Highlights
- The thesis is that the era of digital transformation, namely that pertaining to Salesforce technology, is now over.
- Digital-first is no longer the goal, but the baseline.
- The COVID-19 pandemic forced a nuclear acceleration of digital transformation (as backed up by the McKinsey report).
- The Salesforce job market grew exponentially in 2021, but demand has since significantly died back.
Recently, I suggested that Anthropic could (and perhaps should) acquire Salesforce. In that article, I raised something that resonated with many readers. I suggested that, following the boom that the pandemic forced upon the world, the era of business digital transformation was well and truly over.
If this statement is true, then it has a profound impact on the future of Salesforce professional careers. As the demand subsides, a job vortex is left in its place. This is something many professionals are already experiencing, as we’ve seen in our latest Salesforce Admin Survey 2026. So, what are the facts? And where to from here? Let’s dive in and answer these questions.
What Digital Transformation Actually Means
You may be old enough to remember when filing cabinets and physical record storage were the norm in business. It may not even have been that long ago, depending on the industry you were involved in. Shuffling these business processes into a spreadsheet and an on-prem data storage system was the very first step, but it isn’t what is being referred to here.
When you hear the term ‘digital transformation’, it means moving from legacy systems and platforms (like on-prem storage or applications, spreadsheets, or even paper records) to a cloud-based solution that is accessible everywhere. Think of digital transformation as a movement into a cloud SaaS solution, for a simplified explanation. Salesforce, Xero, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamics are all examples of systems that meet this criterion.
While this is the norm today, it wasn’t the case back in 1999 when Salesforce first hit the scene. The most advanced businesses were leveraging on-prem infrastructure that came with its own list of overheads and limitations. The digital transformation that has taken place since then has made on-prem systems obsolete, and moved business into the cloud.
The End of an Era
The era of digital transformation is well and truly behind us. As I write this, it’s been over 27 years since Salesforce first came on the scene and began to shift the way we think about CRM tooling.
Below is a timeline that explains the era of digital transformation from the perspective of Salesforce specifically.
1999 – 2020 (Strength to Strength)
Following the launch of Salesforce at the end of the 90’s, the company began to grow from nothing to roughly $10B in annual revenue by 2018. They turned their first billion-dollar revenue year in FY09.
There’s no denying that Salesforce was growing rapidly in popularity, despite being taunted as a fad back in the 90’s. Salesforce continually boasts growth during this era, with the company going from strength to strength as businesses slowly move from paper-based and on-prem digital systems to cloud-based SaaS solutions.
2021-2023 (The Pandemic Boom)
COVID hit the world like a truck. From bustling societies around the world, to suddenly being thrust indoors and instructed only to leave the house for essential trips. This meant enterprises needed to totally transform from onsite workplaces to systems that supported physically dispersed teams. Headquarters needed to quickly move from a physical premise to a digital space like Slack.
McKinsey published a report in October of 2020 entitled “How COVID-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point – and transformed business forever”. The report found that companies accelerated their digital transformation plans by roughly 3-4 years, and the number of digital or digitally-enabled products in the company portfolio jumped by roughly 7 years.
This was the period in which a majority of businesses, if they had not already digitized and moved to cloud-based solutions, were doing so in droves. During this period, Salesforce’s own revenue growth didn’t spike significantly in the immediate COVID financial year, which could likely be explained by the fact that Salesforce’s financial year ends at the end of January. This means that FY21 (where revenue growth was up 24.3% from the year before) was the actual pandemic year.
10K released its “2024 Salesforce Talent Ecosystem Report” that showed there was a 364% increase in global Salesforce talent demand in 2021, right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
This was the nuclear event that pushed enterprises around the world into overdrive and forced the digital transformation that had been swirling for the prior two decades. This digital transformation focus pushed budgets into Salesforce and other business tools, which directly led to the over 300% increase in global Salesforce professional demand.
2023 – Today (Artificial Intelligence)
Following the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the world went AI crazy. Consumers and end-users gained access to extremely powerful LLMs and AI tools the likes of which they had never seen or had access to before. Salesforce, as with other major SaaS players, jumped on the bandwagon and began working on and putting out AI tools. These tools leveraged the data that had been built up within Salesforce’s traditional tools and put it to use.
Salesforce’s own annual reports show that its professional services revenue (which captures new implementations and digital transformation work) has fallen for three years straight. It was $2.32B in FY24, $2.22B in FY25, and most recently came in at $2.14B in FY26. What Salesforce said in their SEC filings was even more intriguing – they attributed the decline to less demand for larger transformation projects, and delayed projects in some cases.
This era also signaled the end of the digital transformation, as SaaS tools like Salesforce had already been implemented in most businesses, and those that did not choose to digitize their systems had likely fallen away during the pandemic.
This left many of the Salesforce professionals who had been born during the COVID era looking for new work, and competing for far fewer jobs than were available before. The Salesforce job market was a buyer’s market where employers and recruiters hold all the leverage.
Many Salesforce professionals are upskilling on new AI tools to try to gain a competitive edge over the competition. This is the era we are currently working in today.
From Digital-First to Agentic Enterprise
When we consider where the Salesforce industry has come from, there’s something that becomes quite clear. Where digital-first was the original goal, it has become the new baseline. For businesses, the competitive edge is no longer having a cloud-based system – this is the norm. The new competitive edge in 2026 is having AI tooling that works effectively for your business, creating efficiencies that were unimaginable in the earlier days of Salesforce.
This is the next big challenge. Gone are the days of digital transformation. Instead, we are now entering into the era of figuring out where AI can be used to create a leg-up on our competition.
What This Means For Salesforce Professionals
If you’ve been open to new opportunities in the Salesforce space in the last few years, you’ve likely noticed that the number of open Salesforce roles is significantly lower than it was a few years ago. You’ll have felt the pinch of fighting with many other Salesforce professionals who are also looking at those same roles.
In fact, even if you’re not looking for a new role, I’d challenge you right now to open up a job-seeking website and check to see how many roles equivalent to your current one are available. You may be surprised. This is the world we live in now – an oversupply of Salesforce professionals, and not enough jobs to go around.
This problem was caused by the extreme demand for Salesforce professionals during the pandemic era, and is exacerbated by the AI boom.
The good news is that this won’t last forever. Booms and busts come in waves, as we’ve seen across the eras I talked about earlier. The dotcom boom was another such example. At first, everyone was clambering to get involved, but then the crash came. Following that was the mobile app boom. Everyone had to have an app, no matter what it did. Then, the crash came. Boom, bust, boom, bust – but after each bust came the next boom.
Your job as a Salesforce professional at the end of the digital transformation boom is to continue doing what you’ve always done in terms of Salesforce mastery, but keep your eyes open for new opportunities. Upskill in AI tooling and learn to leverage it to create more value in the Salesforce ecosystem than you could ever be capable of on your own.
While this period of time is higher effort and lower reward, take comfort in knowing that it won’t last forever.
Summary
I’m sure you can agree, the gold rush of the early 2020s when digital transformation was ripe for the picking is over. The new baseline, not the gold standard, is digital first. We’re entering into a new unknown, an era where business competition is won through effective use of AI, not by having cloud-based digital systems.
Do you agree that the era of digital transformation is over? What do you think the timeline is for the next big boom, or has it begun already in the form of AI?
