If you haven’t heard, we recently published the Salesforce Ben Developer Survey Results, and the findings are eye-opening. One thing that stood out to me was the use of artificial intelligence across various roles.
Given the title of this article, you won’t be surprised to learn that it’s the developers who tend to be using AI more so than administrators, but what might intrigue you is just why that is. This article will explain what these reasons are, how admins can better use AI in their day-to-day roles, and what the future may hold for AI for admins and developers.
What the Survey Tells Us
I’m not going to spoil the report as it’s worth your time to go and read it in its entirety, but I will highlight some key learnings that I’ve noticed while reading it myself. The first thing that will come as no shock is that a vast majority of Salesforce professionals who responded to the survey are using AI in their role to some degree on a regular basis. You have to remember, this is up from what we assume is close to 0% prior to November 2022, when the initial release of ChatGPT thrust AI as we know it into the mainstream.
There was some fluctuation across the kinds of roles that use AI and how they use it, though, and one thing that stood out to me personally was the degree to which developers use AI on a relatively regular basis. One of the statistics that we mentioned in the report is that 90% of developers leverage some kind of AI in their role.
With tools like Agentforce Vibes now available and being pushed by Salesforce, it doesn’t shock me that developers are speeding up their workflows by having AI do some of the repetitive tasks for them, allowing them to focus their time on the more complex work that requires them to think deeply. AI can also be used to analyse code to help bring a new dev up to speed on existing code quickly.
Admins, on the other hand, showed only 61% using AI daily in the 2025 Admin Survey Results. This could be because our modern AI assistive tools in Salesforce tend to be more code/metadata-centric, and an admin’s tool of choice is typically clicks, not code. It could be that the use cases for AI for an admin are seemingly outside of the realm of Salesforce administration, with tools like ChatGPT and Gemini lacking the knowledge and understanding of your Salesforce org.
There are a lot of other factors to take into account, and it may simply be that the effort to value distance is a bit longer for admins than it is for developers.
How Developers Leverage AI
There are so many developer-focused tools that the Salesforce community has at its disposal, with the recent addition of Agentforce Vibes coming from the mothership itself adding fuel to the fire. Almost half of the developers that we surveyed use GitHub Copilot to assist with their coding, with Agentforce for Developers (now Agentforce Vibes) trailing closely behind at roughly 40%. In fact, of the 18 tools that at least one respondent said they used, four were used by at least 20% of respondents: GitHub Copilot, Agentforce for Developers (Agentforce Vibes), Cursor, and Claude Code.
When it comes to what developers actually use these tools for, we found an astonishing majority were using them to generate test classes – 47% of respondents in fact! Another great use that we see (both code and non-code) was the generation of documentation, with 36.5% of respondents saying that they use AI to generate documentation to go along with their code. This sort of thing is really quite beneficial, as it allows developers to focus on development rather than spending a large portion of their time writing documentation.
Approximately a third of respondents also use AI to write business logic documents, explain error messages, increase efficiency in workflows, and refactor or optimize code. By the looks of our data, very few developers are handing off entire tasks to AI to take over end-to-end, but rather are leveraging it as a tool to help them optimize some of the more repetitive, time-consuming parts of their role so they can focus their efforts on more complex problems.
Why Admins Use AI Less Than Developers
I’ve already alluded to this earlier in the article, but one of the key reasons for the differing AI adoption within the Salesforce ecosystem could likely be the tools that Salesforce Admins have available to them, as opposed to developers. I think of one of the best use cases that I’ve seen since the AI boom is Einstein for Flow.
Einstein for Flow is an incredibly powerful tool that allows admins to essentially chat with Flow Builder. Two key features that it has are the ability to construct Flows for you and the ability to troubleshoot and explain what a Flow does. I’m oversimplifying it because that’s not really within the scope of this article, but my point is that it’s a brilliant tool! So what’s the problem?
The problem is that this tool, and many others like it, are not included for free with Salesforce, like Agentforce Vibes is. The adoption of tools like this is not entirely hindered by the additional cost of entry, but it certainly doesn’t help, especially when you consider that powerful tools like Agentforce Vibes are readily available in all customer orgs.
It’s not that admins are not using AI in their workflows at all – in fact, quite the contrary. Admins also use AI to create documentation, increase their productivity, and explain errors, just to name a few.
How Can Admins Use AI in New Ways
This brings up an interesting conversation when it comes to additional ways that admins can find more value in artificial intelligence tools in their day-to-day work life now.
One tool that admins could find value in, but should be extremely careful when using, is Agentforce Vibes. The reality that we’ve all learned time and time again since 2022 is that AI doesn’t think – it identifies patterns. It doesn’t always produce the most reliable results. It takes inputs (context, data, prompts, etc.) and does its best to construct a response or take an action that makes the most logical sense.
Agentforce Vibes is handy, but not perfect. I’ve been stress testing it lately due to the fact that they’ve put it right there next to Developer Console in the Setup dropdown menu, as I know many will be wanting to use it, and I wanted to be able to share what it does well, what it struggles with, and how admins and newcomers can get better at prompting it.
There’s also value for admins in Agentforce powered by Setup, which admins could use to speed up their daily administrative tasks or troubleshooting. Again, think of AI as a tool that you have at your disposal to speed up your workflows rather than a tool to take them away completely.
What Will Future Surveys Tell Us?
I think we’ll see less AI usage in the future… Okay, just checking that you’re still paying attention!
Of course, we’re going to see more AI usage for the foreseeable future. I have no doubt that developers will continue to find value in tools like Agentforce Vibes as they grow stronger, documentation improves, and we all get familiar with how it best works and fits into our day-to-day.
Admins will also start seeing additional tools and use cases become available from Salesforce, and I really would like to see some love for all admins by delivering some of these tools as part of the platform rather than locking them behind a paywall. I understand locking it away for some of the more advanced tools, sure, but give admins something like an Agentforce Vibes.
My honest belief is that we’ll start seeing new roles when we break down those numbers too – in fact, we’re already starting to see them. Salesforce Admin, Architect, Developer, Prompt Engineer, AI Business Analyst, etc.
Summary
Artificial Intelligence is doing some really interesting things to our ecosystem at the moment, and we’re seeing so many Salesforce veterans start using these tools to optimize their workflows. Developers are seeing some real value in the tools they’re using, and we’ve seen a significantly high rate of adoption so far, with roughly nine in every ten developers using the tools relatively frequently.
If you’re an admin, how are you currently using AI to assist in your day-to-day work? If you’re not using it yet, why not? And developers – what are some benefits of using AI that you believe could help an administrator, and are there things that they should avoid doing with AI (like writing entire LWCs, Apex Triggers, etc.)?
Want to learn more? Make sure to download our SF Ben Salesforce Developer Survey Results 2025.
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