Here Are Your Salesforce Job Trends for 2025

It’s been an eventful year for the Salesforce ecosystem, and there can be little doubt that 2025 will shape up to be just as monumental for the cloud giant’s economy.

With the company’s hard pivot to AI – and the release of its flagship product, Agentforce – it’s more important than ever for those of us in the ecosystem to keep on top of what’s happening in terms of jobs, trends, and skills.

A Look Back at 2024…

It had been something of a rough year for the Salesforce economy, particularly towards the start of 2024. Challenges faced by the mothership trickled down to its partner ecosystem, creating a ripple that has resulted in reductions of workforce and layoffs across several companies that built their businesses around Salesforce.

But there is something of a new buzz around Salesforce going into 2025, mainly due to the company’s focus shift to agents. Some in the ecosystem had wondered whether the cloud giant had already ‘peaked’, but Dreamforce ‘24 seemed to send a jolt of life back through Salesforce – and this was reflected in the stock price late last year.

The Salesforce economy seems to be growing overall, and we are seeing something of an uptick in conversations and opportunities for automation and artificial intelligence. The next 12 months will be very telling for the company, bearing in mind Salesforce’s hard pivot into Agentforce.

“It’s not only the new technology but a whole new usage-based pricing model with its new products (Data Cloud included) that is a very large departure from the traditional SaaS model we’ve been accustomed to for the past 20 years or so,” said Erick Mahle from Lendz Financial.

“While I certainly don’t think we are going back to the ‘golden years’ of Salesforce talent demand, if Agentforce delivers on its promise, you could see a second wave of demand out there.”

So, Will 2025 Be Better Than 2024?

There was a slowdown for the Salesforce economy in 2024, and the employee market still shows evidence of some stagnancy – for instance, a number of contractors have been struggling to jump on projects and lowing day rates.

“I’m not sure yet if 2025 is going to be a complete 180 to that, but there are certain clouds and industries which seem to be picking up speed,” Jessica Oliver, from Cosimo Consulting, told Salesforce Ben.

Others in the ecosystem see high levels of optimism for 2025; however, this is still nonetheless tempered with skepticism towards Agentforce.

“Its early read is that it can solve a lot of business pains and automation, but it was brought to market a bit too early, with pricing that’s a little… out there,” said Nathan Brown of AscendX. “However, with Salesforce all in on agents, you can see and hear the excitement is back in what was seen as dying tech just a year ago.”

How Salesforce further enhances the LLMs and agents in the next few releases will be critical to combat the AI likes of OpenAi and Claude, he added. The enhanced focus on AI adoption has led to overall growth in the partner ecosystem, according to Nathan.

Some say that aspects of the downturn in the Salesforce economy recently were related to post-COVID corrections, along with an election year in the US.

“Whether you were happy with the outcome of the presidential election cycle or not, at least now businesses have more clarity into how the US economy will be governed over the next few years and will hopefully start loosening up the purse strings a bit,” said Nick Hamm, Founder and CEO of 10K.

The primary reason for a better 2025 would likely be whether Agentforce can deliver on its value promise. If that’s the case, then a lot of experienced Salesforce admins might be sought after by companies with Agentforce implementations, with new entrants to the market being brought in to backfill the more senior Admins that take on Agentforce.

Max Goodger, of Cloud4Solutions, says that in terms of Financial Services in the United States, there’s definitely a much more positive outlook now than there was in 2024

He said: “Historically, financial services is an industry that is resistant to change and not as driven by digital transformation as others. However, Salesforce’s capabilities, particularly when it comes to sales enablement and allowing their advisors to do more with less, pose a significant value proposition that they can’t ignore.”

He added that the likes of JPMC, BlackRock and Morgan Stanley have long dominated the market, so those trying to take market share from these businesses are focused on delivering a service that eclipses those businesses.

Which Trends Will Affect the Salesforce Economy?

Influencer marketing, US economy changes and regulations, and AI-driven solutions have each been mentioned as trends which could affect the Salesforce economy.

Regarding AI solutions, Nathan Brown said more technologies are building on top of Agentforce, and he thinks we will begin to see an Agent AppExchange with agents focused on vertical trends. The broader macroeconomic environment is also something to consider. If the Salesforce economy is going to be driven forward, businesses need to invest in technology initiatives.

“There has generally been a larger focus on profitability over growth in a slowing economy,” says Nick Hamm. “So, businesses will be looking to do more with less by automating resource-intensive business processes, expecting more productivity and a wider set of capabilities from their employees and partners, and closely evaluating their spend on technology purchases over the past couple of years.”

AI will likely continue to be at the forefront of discussions, but there is also a lot of excitement about how Data Cloud is helping bring datasets together to enrich the CRM data and bring more insights for organizations.

“I believe understanding the foundation of Data Cloud may give organizations the push needed to clean up some of its data models to be able to properly leverage AI within the companies,” according to Erick Mahle, Vice President of Revenue Operations at Lendz Financial.

But while AI is certainly a big topic for Salesforce, people may come to realise after “a pilot or two” that the real focus on their platforms should be data quality and technical debt, says Jess Oliver.

Alex Mackay, from Tequity, says the company anticipates and is forecasting an upbeat year for many of the major enterprise SaaS players – including Salesforce.

“There is likely to be more growth in the ecosystem compared to 2023/4, and there will be more M&A and capital funding opportunities,” he said.

“AI is going to be a serious contribution to growth and, at the same time, a major threat to those who don’t find the Agentforce tailwinds. Any task or role that is an easier solution built offshore or near shore will be susceptible. Some will be fairly obvious, like pure configuration, and others won’t, such as digital graphic creation. Everyone needs to be digging into the details to find the best opportunities.”

Agentforce, AI, and Growth

For existing customers of Salesforce, there is good scope for Agentforce, according to Jess Oliver, but she worries that the cloud giant is talking less about its core offerings to promote their flagship AI, which could alienate new logos.

When asked if she sees AI as having a positive or negative impact on the Salesforce labour market, she replied: “Positive if people jump on the bandwagon! Salesforce admits they really need Agentforce skills in the marketplace. Definitely more roles for non-tech around AI – prompt writing, process mapping, etc.”

Others believe it may be too early to call how Agentforce will affect Salesforce’s future growth prospects, and while there is a lot of investment coming from Salesforce, maybe it’s a “bit too much”.

“The jury is still out if it is another ‘Einstein/shiny object of the year’, or if this will be a foundational building block of Salesforce’s future,” says Nathan Brown. “Either way, they are going to be driving it to every client and prospect, and we need to leverage it.”

He believes that AI will likely have a positive impact on the Salesforce labor market, but believes admins will need to upskill and adapt to stay competitive. Others believe that AI is going to massively disrupt not just the Salesforce labor market but also many others over the coming years.

Specific to the Salesforce ecosystem, it may come to be that knowing Agentforce will be table stakes for a successful long-term career in this ecosystem.

Agentforce is becoming “everything” for Salesforce, says Nick Hamm. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Salesforce changed their name to Agentforce in 2025. Agentforce is the future of the Salesforce platform and ecosystem,” he added.

In terms of how the labor market may be affected by the burgeoning AI sector, it may simply be that it will positively affect those who adopt it – and negatively impact those who do not. Regarding how Agentforce might affect future growth prospects, some have pointed out that Salesforce is pushing more products out faster than companies seem to be able to keep up with.

Erick Mahle says: “Even with RAG (retrieval augmented technology) out there, the adage ‘garbage in, garbage out’ continues to ring true. With organizations leveraging more data than ever before, the success of Agentforce may be significantly hampered by companies who jump in too soon without fully understanding the amount of work they need to do on their own systems as a prerequisite to be successful.”

While it’s understood that Salesforce has put their own guardrail functionality on Agentforce, it may not be enough without a lot of attention to detail to how it interacts with its existing data in order to be successful, he added.

Salesforce Product and Job Relevancy

Salesforce has been around for almost 26 years and has seen an ecosystem of professionals grow around the ‘mothership’ during this time. While this has often meant an expanding pool of new roles and areas of expertise emerging, it can also mean positions become less relevant over time, and those who fail to adapt and upskill fall behind.

Going into 2025, especially with Salesforce’s hard pivot to AI, it may be the case that some products – and roles – become less relevant. Josh Matthews told Salesforce Ben that Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA), Data Cloud, and Commerce Cloud are all experiencing increased demand. Core Salesforce products such as Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud have significant market saturation, and growth is predicted to slow, he added.

“That said, the number of poorly implemented solutions over the past two years is generating a moderate increase in demand to repair and improve these orgs to working order,” he said. “Salesforce Staffing has seen more demand for repairing poorly implemented orgs this year than in the prior three years.”

He believes that the typical junior and mid-level Salesforce Administrator positions are at the highest risk for less relevance – an opinion he shares with a few other notable voices – as AI service companies introduce admin bots and personas that can be prompted to perform company-specific administration tasks without the use of Agentforce or the need for training.

“This allows smaller companies to employ cost-effective administrative solutions with minimal weekly or monthly oversight by a consulting company or managed service,” he said. “Also, developer positions are at risk. Companies are allowing code to be built with confidence by less experienced developers.”

Erick Mahle says that any business systems role continues to become more and more relevant at a steady pace over the years, and Salesforce is no different.

“Albeit with a salary correction from its peaks over the past few years, the demand for Salesforce experts will continue to be there for years to come,” he added.

Jess Oliver says product owners, Data Cloud specialists and people working in integration will see their roles become more relevant, while “generalists” without specific expertise might feel more of a sting.

Nathan Brown thinks experts in Tableau, AI, and Mulesoft will enjoy more relevance, while admins, non-certified Apex developers, and Visualforce devs will be less so.

Final Thoughts

If there’s one common theme across every area we’ve covered, it’s Agentforce. AI is very much front-and-center for Salesforce, which is undoubtedly having ripple effects for everyone in the ecosystem.

Those wishing to stay relevant – and competitive – will likely want to familiarize themselves as best they can with the flagship product, which has been dominating discussions about the Salesforce ecosystem ever since its release.