Ever since the release of Salesforce’s proprietary AI offering Agentforce last September, many of the company’s largest events have been rebranded to align with it. From Agentforce World Tour with its complete rebrand to the bigger events like TDX – which is being cited as the “developer conference for the AI agent era” – Salesforce has made it very clear what its core focus is.
However, on the ground, many members of Salesforce’s ecosystem – end users, customers, partners, and more – are expressing that their wants and needs have been left behind. Citing an abandonment of progressing the core platform and getting them up to speed with processes that precede Agentforce, it poses a question: has Salesforce really forgotten about the importance of their community?
Salesforce’s Agentforce Push
If there’s one effort that Salesforce has been dedicated to wholly in the last year, it’s their Agentforce effort. You can’t escape it – it’s the driving force behind all of their latest marketing campaigns, product progressions, events, and more.
Salesforce is now proudly and firmly an AI-first organization, dedicated to helping organizations “create a limitless workforce with Agentforce.”
After an unsteady start, Agentforce has finally had its comeuppance; the company’s latest earnings call revealed that Agentforce had surpassed 4,000 paid deals and over 8,000 transactions, generating over $100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) since its launch last year.
Salesforce also recently announced that their Agentforce on Help agent had handled over one million support requests, indicating a significant benchmark for the cloud giant.
However, despite this, both the company and the tool continue to come under fire, especially in the wake of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s latest comments regarding how much Agentforce is being used internally, with many quick to criticize supposedly sensationalist marketing and overhyping.
What’s the Problem?
Many members of Salesforce’s ecosystem continuously stress that although Agentforce as a tool has a lot of potential, it remains a far-fetched reality for them. Agentforce has been cited as expensive, unnecessarily confusing, or just not something that many companies feel ready to align with, creating a considerable disconnect between Salesforce and a large proportion of its community.
Although Salesforce is trying to take the community’s thoughts into consideration – most notably with their latest pricing strategy adjustment and wealth of training materials – many members of the community have made their feelings clear: perhaps in an effort to mitigate this issue, Salesforce’s Agentforce push has been too much.
It started with the initial announcement and snowballed from there, leading to the renaming of events, the restructuring of product roadmaps and developments, the withdrawal of some of the community’s most-used frameworks, and for many, a sudden and complete disregard for a lot of the core knowledge and customers at the heart of the business.
How Has This Affected the Community?
After Salesforce’s latest World Tour and TrailblazerDX events in London, Salesforce trainer Connie Hazendonk took to LinkedIn to boldly claim that Salesforce was “ignoring 80% of its customer base.”
Having attended the World Tour event (which had unsurprisingly been named Agentforce World Tour London), Connie claimed that she had seen Salesforce’s disregard of the core community in clear view, and that many people shared her views.
“After dozens of conversations with clients, old connections, and people I met standing in queues, the pattern was clear,” she wrote. “Most are not ready for Agentforce. Not even close.”
“They’re still drowning in bad/dirty data, poor user adoption, users struggling with basic system navigation, and admins who don’t know how to start writing a ‘good prompt’.
“Yet, Salesforce seems to be flooring the accelerator even faster this year, pushing AI solutions most customers can’t yet use… because their foundations are broken.”
She ended her status with: “Agentforce might be the future. But thousands of customers need help in the present.”
It was apparent almost immediately that Connie’s post had struck a nerve – it quickly went viral, with hundreds of comments and over a thousand reactions. Many took to the platform to share that they had been feeling the same, and that they didn’t know how to get their thoughts out there.
Matt Hafford, the Founder of MissionXI, wrote: “I have been saying this for months. Salesforce are running too fast for their customers and partners to keep up.”
Daryl Moon, a Salesforce Trainer, also expressed his agreement, citing his experience hosting a Summer ‘25 highlights webinar where the participants cheered when they said they would ignore the Agentforce updates, as many customers were just not ready for them or “flogged to death” with them.
Mixed Opinions
Although a substantial portion of the feedback to Connie’s post was in agreement with her claims, many were also quick to point out that the situation is, unfortunately, just not that black and white.
Data Cloud expert Mehmet Gökmen Orun highlighted that there definitely had been more sessions on creating prompts vs. getting ready for AI or architecting the right framework recently, which is true – a number of sessions from just World Tour London reflected this.
However, he admitted that more time should be dedicated to these very important topics.
Others pointed out this kind of pivot and “full steam ahead” effort from Salesforce was nothing new – they had done this with Data Cloud, and then with Einstein. Indeed, efforts like this go back as far as Chatter, mobile, and even Lightning adoption.
Massimo D’Attoma, the Vice President of Solution Engineering at Salesforce, said that after spending 35 years in the industry, this was something he had heard time and time again.
“I have heard the same, for almost every major vendor, every time a disruptive innovation is brought to light,” he said. “No business is ever ready for a disruptive innovation; that’s why we call it disruptive.”
Evidently, the ecosystem seems to be torn – torn between wanting to step into the world of agentic AI and actually being ready for it.
Where Does The Blame Lie?
The explosive response to Connie’s post signifies one main thing: there is a problem with how the community has been perceiving Agentforce and Salesforce’s attitude towards Agentforce. It could be possible that Salesforce just doesn’t have a clear picture of where a lot of companies are in their product journeys, and might automatically assume that because the interest is there, the readiness is there too.
Connie told Salesforce Ben that, in her opinion, many companies just aren’t there yet.
“Most companies just aren’t ready,” she said. “They have bad data, low user adoption – there are so many core problems there, and Salesforce just doesn’t talk about it.”
However, one main counterargument stands: is this something that lies within the realm of Salesforce’s responsibility?
“People comment saying: ‘it’s the latest thing, it’s what they have to do’,” Connie explained. “I agree with that, but even if they [Salesforce] would just have something like 15-20% [of event sessions] on core, that would be great.”
“It’s not 100% Salesforce’s obligation – it’s a shared obligation between Salesforce because they’re the ones that developed the tool, and it’s the responsibility of the wider ecosystem too.”
Robert Sösemann, Principal Architect at Aquiva Labs and AI enthusiast, said that he understood many of the ecosystem’s frustrations, but that they shouldn’t expect too much from Salesforce in this regard.
“I really believe that Salesforce could become obsolete if they don’t put all their forces into Agentforce,” he said.
“I can deeply understand all the people who are not in the luxury situation that I’m in, and can’t do Agentforce – it’s a very different world. I understand their frustration, and I also feel they should be a little bit concerned that the situation will soon get worse with AI becoming dominant in their areas of work.”
“But just because Salesforce pivots, it doesn’t mean that all the people in the space need to pivot. You can decide if you jump on – I totally jumped on it and I’m happy I did.”
“Salesforce is not there to please MVPs or Golden Hoodies.”
Solving this problem doesn’t lie solely on Salesforce, but just how much of a role does the community play in this?
The Community’s Responsibility
When the community was getting increasingly concerned about the future of their community groups and frameworks (namely Salesforce Military and the Well-Architected Framework), Salesforce MVP Stephanie Herrera came out and said that the ecosystem shouldn’t be relying on Salesforce to make the changes they wanted to see.
“I’m not gonna wait for Salesforce to provide that [solution] to me,” she told Salesforce Ben. “There is a need – let’s show them how it’s done.”
This sentiment should also be applied to this situation; the community believes that they’re missing something, so they have an obligation to make their voices heard, push for a difference, and position the first stepping stones for change.
What Needs to Change?
So, the problems are there – how do we solve them?
To Connie, the answer is clear: she wants Salesforce to really listen to what their community is asking for, instead of just peddling AI and Agentforce all the time, everywhere, at all costs.
“If they would honestly just go around the floors and talk to people, actually listen to what people are saying, they would understand that yes, there is something we have to do in addition to giving these glorified Agentforce sessions,” she said.
“I want to get partners in or people from the ecosystem to tell the stories – the core stories – about project management, how well user training is going… nobody’s really been talking about this for the last part of about five years.”
She believes that for those in the ecosystem who are actually eager to get started with Agentforce, they would benefit from sessions that break down some of the tool’s key functionalities on a more granular level, like how to actually write a good prompt.
“We want Agentforce. We can see the benefit of it. But we need help in regards to how we can translate what we need into the right prompts,” she said. “They always copy and paste in the exercises – but how do you actually write that?”
Robert said that he thinks that the main effort should actually come from the top of the food chain – right from Marc Benioff himself.
“I think what Salesforce should do – what Benioff should do – should be bold and say ‘what does this mean?’” he said. “He should make a bold statement that not all the topics that were relevant for the last ten years will be relevant in a year.”
So, in summary, the main changes that need to be made in order to tackle this wider problem are:
- Increase the communication between Salesforce and its community. The responsibility lies with both Salesforce and its ecosystem here – for the community to adequately get across what they want from Salesforce, and for Salesforce to listen and respond accordingly.
- Have the community take initiative through self-starting and pushing for change. The ecosystem should want Salesforce to listen to them and take action, but this doesn’t mean that the ecosystem should just sit around and wait for this to happen. Keep submitting non-Agentforce session ideas, and holding webinars, workshops, and community events on core subjects. Keep the knowledge sharing going.
- Have Salesforce recognize that its community wants more of a knowledge/content split. The community is invested in Agentforce – this much is obvious. But they also want to hear about how core functionality is progressing and the finer details of how to get started with Agentforce and their agentic AI journeys.
- Remain realistic. At the end of the day, Salesforce is a leader in its space, but is also a for-profit company. They’re ambitious, they’re pushing ground-breaking technology, and they are fiercely competitive. This always needs to be noted when considering what support Salesforce can offer.
Final Thoughts
So, has Salesforce forgotten about 80% of its customer base? I would say not quite.
It is likely that Salesforce just doesn’t have as much awareness of what is happening on the ground as the community thinks. The effort to listen more has already started – Salesforce continually asks for feedback, and now the responsibility lies with both the company and the community to push forward for mutually beneficial change.
In fact, there’s a virtual Community Coffee session on tonight (Monday 14th), which is the perfect place to get in your questions and thoughts on Salesforce’s support of the community. You can find out more about that here.
The agentic era is here to stay – this much is evident. But for it to fully take off, the very community that it relies on will need to feel supported so it can deliver the best results.
