Everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem has an opinion on Agentforce. What’s interesting is how few of those people are actually running it in production.
I was at a Salesforce user group meeting a few weeks ago. The room was full of practitioners, admins, architects, developers, people who live in the platform every day. Agentforce was in the sandbox at most of their companies. But when it came to actually getting work done, they were reaching for Claude and other AI tools. External tools were faster to spin up and easier to justify on a cost basis. The honest consensus I heard was that Agentforce is expensive to use and harder to get going than a direct tool. That’s not a knock on the product. It’s just where the market actually is right now.
Salesforce’s own adoption numbers tell a similar story. Somewhere around 10 to 15 percent of their customer base is actively using it. That means the other 85 percent are watching, evaluating, or waiting to see if the ROI story gets clearer.
And yet job descriptions are already filling up with Agentforce requirements.
I understand the instinct. Nobody wants to build a 2023 team in 2026. But there’s a real difference between hiring for a capability your org isn’t using yet and hiring for the foundational skills that will actually make Agentforce work when you do get there. Automation depth, data literacy, business process design, integration thinking, and the ability to govern AI outputs responsibly are the things that matter right now. These are skills that are a lot harder to screen for than a certification.
The question worth asking before you write that job description isn’t whether your next hire knows Agentforce. It’s whether they’ll know how to drive value with it when your org is actually ready.
Those are two very different conversations. What are you experiencing?
If you’re a hiring manager trying to figure out what your Salesforce team should look like in the next one to two years, I’d welcome the chance to think through it with you.
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