Salesforce stock took a hit this week after an analyst downgrade. The reasoning is more interesting than the stock move. Customers told the analyst two things. Their data isn’t ready for meaningful AI workflows, and Agentforce itself isn’t mature enough yet.
One job post got my attention: It was asking for 3 to 5 years of Agentforce experience which is nonsensical. Agentforce hasn’t been generally available that long. It’s not an aggressive requirement, it’s a number that doesn’t exist yet, and it tells me the person who wrote it doesn’t fully understand what they’re asking for.
I’m seeing a related gap from the candidate side. Plenty of Salesforce professionals are learning Agentforce, going through Trailhead, poking around in a sandbox. But when it’s time to ship something real, a good number of them reach for Claude Code instead. The reason someone gave me this week was specific. Agentforce only works with data that’s already on the platform. Tools like Claude Code can reach off platform data too, which matters when the problem doesn’t live entirely inside Salesforce.
That distinction points at something bigger than Agentforce itself. I’ve been building with an agentic AI tool called Hermes in my own business this year, and it’s changed how I think about this. Most people still equate AI with chat. Ask a question, get an answer, done. Agentic AI is a different animal. It acts, it chains steps together, it makes decisions inside a process instead of just describing one. A lot of hiring managers writing these job descriptions are still picturing the chat version.
So you’ve got hiring managers asking for years of experience that don’t exist yet, in a skill they may not fully understand themselves, while the people actually building with agentic tools are quietly doing it somewhere else.
If you’re writing your next Salesforce hire right now, are you screening for Agentforce years, or for whether someone actually understands agentic AI at all?
If you want help thinking through what that role should actually require, I’m happy to have that conversation with you.
