Sam Donaghey
to the Fast Slow Motion podcast where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghey. And today I’m joined by Fast Slow Motion’s director of AI, Zack Terry, who’s going to be breaking down everything you need to know about the Salesforce Summer 25 release. This is a big one. Salesforce is rolling out major changes across the platform. So you’re to want to hear what Zach’s take is on what’s new, what matters and where the platform is headed next. So Zack.

It’s awesome to see you today on the show.

Zack
Sam, always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Sam Donaghey
Well, listen, before we get into the details, Zack, can you first give us a high level overview of what stood out to you in the summer 25 release?

Zack
Absolutely a lot of exciting updates coming in this release and you know some things that are more maintenance related So just some things that you have to take care of some housekeeping if you will But of course, we’ve got some great updates coming to flow which is one of my personal favorite features at Salesforce has so a lot of exciting updates there It wouldn’t be a Salesforce podcast if we didn’t mention the word Agentforce So definitely plenty of Agentforce updates coming in this next release updates to revenue cloud as well with the end of sales for CPQ Salesforce is pushing

lot of updates in the revenue cloud and really focusing in on that. There’s continued investment in the marketing cloud on platform tools. So that’s growth and advanced. So moving a lot of those marketing capabilities on platform, continuing to invest in the capabilities that those tools have in comparison to things like marketing cloud, exact target or marketing cloud account engagement, also known as Pardot. And then of course we have some exciting updates coming to Einstein activity capture that I think a lot of people are going to be.

Happy to hear and of course a lot more. So looking forward to diving in.

Sam Donaghey
Well, let’s start with the big announcements. So we saw that Salesforce is retiring API versions 21 through 30. So can you unpack what this means and who it’s going to impact the most?

Zack
In short, every new release that Salesforce brings out comes with a new API version. So this is just the next API version. I believe this is number 65. So if you have three releases a year, that API version is incrementing each time. So three times a year. This particular release is retiring API versions 21 through 30. And this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that’s been on the platform for a while.

I think sales force has been sending out emails about this for close to a year if not longer than a year but if you haven’t heard about it here’s a chance right any Apex classes you have flows managed packages anything that’s communicating over API if you are using any of those older versions 21 through 30 those are going to cease working so you will not be able to make call outs on those API anymore so.

The main call to action here is to make sure that your Apex classes, your flows, any of managed packages, any connections that you have are using an up-to-date version of Salesforce API. So again, this next version is gonna be on 65. As long as it’s above 30, you should be okay, but I would recommend getting anything that’s maybe a little bit older in the mid 30s, 40s. Go ahead and get those updated as well because this is a regular occurrence.

with enough time passing between releases. Salesforce retires these pretty regularly. Now, to give you an example of just how old this is, version 30 was released in the spring of 2014. So you’re talking about something, it’s more than a decade old, right? Now that doesn’t mean you’re not at risk of having anything that old in the org, even if you’re a new customer, if you happen to download a managed package and it hasn’t been updated in a long time.

It’s definitely worth checking, but this is definitely more directed towards customers that have been on the platform for a long time and most likely have some of those older API versions. So again, not a surprise, just a reminder that this is coming with this release. So make sure that you are evaluating and updating those API versions so that they don’t suddenly stop.

Sam Donaghey
Another headline is the upcoming end of life for process builder. And I know it’s been a long time coming, but the deadline’s getting close now. So what’s your advice for teams that haven’t fully made the move to

Zack
It has been a long time coming and my advice remains the same, but perhaps it’s just a little bit more urgent. And that advice is to take those workflow rules, take those process builders and get them moved over to Flow, right? Hire someone like us, hire someone in-house that can come in and can evaluate those process builders, those workflow rules and determine how to map those over to Flow. There is a tool that will allow you to convert your process builders and your workflows directly to Flow, but

What we have found in our experience is that it only works for the simplest sort of use cases. If you have any complexity in that process builder, in that workflow rule, it may not translate directly to the flow that gets created using that tool. So my advice is to generally map out what these processes are doing and then take sort of a holistic approach and map how that should actually work when you’re building flow using the latest updates to flow. So for example, if you know you’re to need to loop through something.

Look and see if the transform element is a better use case here as opposed to just, you know, copying it directly over. So yeah, it’s important to make this transition. You know, the end of this year is when support’s officially going to end. Just as a reminder, that doesn’t mean your workflow rules and process builders will stop working. It simply means Salesforce is no longer going to be supporting it. So any bugs that might pop up down the road, those are not going to be fixed.

Sam Donaghey
Mm-hmm.

Zack
any new features that come onto the platform. Process builder and workflow rules will not be taking those into account. So it’s not an emergency, right? It’s not going to make these processes that you have in your org stop working altogether, but it is really important to migrate these over to Flow because that is the declarative automation tool that Salesforce will be supporting into the future. And of course it has a lot more advanced features that really take it way over the top compared to process builder and workflow rules. So you’re getting the added benefit.

Sam Donaghey
you

Zack
More efficient processes you’re getting more features that you can build into those flows So generally speaking I would say if you haven’t done it yet Get on it as soon as you can and if you need help we’re here to help So just let us know if we can kind of come in and help transition over to flow for

Sam Donaghey
let’s move on to something that Salesforce has put a lot of investment into, which is revenue cloud. There were a lot of updates related to this in this release. So can you give us some details on that

Zack
I think we mentioned this on a previous podcast on one of the more recent releases, but Salesforce has officially ended sales of the CPQ product. So if you’ve been around for a long time, this is called Steelbrick. This is what Salesforce acquired and turned into CPQ. And they’re no longer selling this product. Now, before anyone says, no, I have this product, what’s gonna happen? They’re not ending support for it. They’re just not selling new instances of it. So if you’re…

Sam Donaghey
Yeah.

Zack
brand new to Salesforce and you wanna buy a tool to help with your revenue management or you wanna configure price quote tool, you just can no longer buy CPQ, you’ll be directed to Revenue Cloud, but if you’re an existing customer, it’s gonna continue to work into the future. At some point, will they retire it? Perhaps, that’s speculation, that’s not official, but yes, of course, down the road, they may decide to retire that, but all that to say as a result of this end of sales.

We have seen Salesforce invest a lot of time and energy in the form of multiple feature updates coming to Revenue Cloud. Now it’s going to be impossible to talk about all those updates in a podcast, but if you’re interested, definitely check out the release notes and the release deck. There are over 100 slides in the release deck alone that talk about the updates coming to Revenue Cloud. So that

in and of itself is enough to indicate that Salesforce is putting quite a bit of time and money investment into this tool. This is sort of the future of, you know, the CPQ type of product that they have. Of course, revenue cloud is much more than just CPQ. It’s revenue, lifecycle management and contract management and configure price quotes, all kinds of stuff. Right. So if you were previously using CPQ and you’re looking at revenue cloud, it may open up new possibilities for you. There may be other features that revenue cloud has.

But likewise, kind of the other side of that coin is revenue cloud may be overkill for what you need. And you may want to look at a third party CPQ tool that’s more specific just to those needs or look at, you know, something that’s lightweight, maybe a little bit more custom if you don’t have the full robust need that CPQ would have brought. overall, yes, a lot of updates coming to revenue cloud 100 slides is a ton. I mean, you could build an entire, you know, almost an entire release update just around.

the 100 slides that they’re bringing to revenue clouds. So definitely interesting to see Salesforce’s direction here. And I think we’ll continue to see investment on this product over time.

is a little confusing.

Sam Donaghey
you get out the box

features for marketing inside of core, don’t

was that, yeah. Okay. Okay.

Zack
Yeah, with marketing growth in advance. Exactly. And it’s a different

SKU. So now there’s four marketing products,

of which are positions, the ones we’re familiar with, and then two of which are these newer products. And these newer products are receiving update after update every release to really bring parity to the features that they have. Because when it was first released, it didn’t have nearly as many powerful features as these other tools do. But I think we even have

some items that we can discuss here in a little bit about some of the features coming to Marketing Cloud Growth in Advanced that are really making it compete quite nicely with these other legacy tools.

Sam Donaghey
on the admin side, Zach, there were some really practical updates. So can you tell us more about that?

Zack
Absolutely.

We’re continuing to see improvement on the user management side of things. And this has been a recurring theme throughout the past several releases. So all these new buttons that we have on the backend, on the user, on permission sets to easily view what permissions user has, what objects and fields, things like that. So we’re continuing to see enhancements there. There’s a new mass update feature that’s coming for object permissions within a permission set or profile.

So that’s gonna be a big time saver instead of having to go into each individual setting and click for each profile or each permission set, you now have the ability from the object to make bulk updates to multiple permission sets or multiple profiles. So I can’t understate how much time that can potentially save you. If you’re an admin that’s ever had to make changes to multiple permission sets and profiles for a single object, you know how much time that can take. So this should be a pretty big shortcut. In addition, you’ll be able to edit permissions

directly from a permission set summary and you’ll be able to manage permission sets from a permission set group summary. So if you’re on a permission set, for example, and you’re looking at the summary of the permissions that are included within that set, you can now make adjustments to it directly from that summary beforehand. It was just view only. Here’s what you got. You still have to go back into the standard user interface to make those updates. Now you can make updates directly from that list. Same thing with your permission set group. So a mission set group again is just a

group of other permission sets that are bundled together so that you can assign multiple permission sets at once. You can now modify which permission sets are included in that group from the summary screen. And so again, just a nice shortcut, basically just making things a little bit easier than they were before and directly improving upon the last release, right? So these are incremental updates that are happening with these features. Whereas before we just had a view. Now we have a view that’s actionable.

which is really great to see the continued functionality and investment there. ultimately you can kind of, yeah, you can distill that into the menu diving that used to be required for permissions updates is slowly being chipped away, right? It’s slowly becoming more central, the ease of access and the ease of updating this information is really just increasing over time. And that now includes tab settings as well. So you can view tab settings from the access summary now.

Sam Donaghey
That’s awesome.

Zack
which seems small, but that’s another one of those admin things that beforehand was a bit of a needle in a haystack situation. It could take a long time to figure out, where do I need to grant this tab access? And if I’m using the new profile view versus the old profile view, maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not. So just having that ability directly from the summary is going to make things a lot easier.

Sam Donaghey
Right.

I’d imagine people are going to be very excited about these new updates. So let’s talk about the platform and mobile updates. What can you share with us here?

Zack
So on the mobile app,

there’s a feature Salesforce has had for a while called the mobile briefcase, which is just sort of a branded term for what do you want to have available offline? That’s all it is. So you can kind of think about it like a digital briefcase. I’m going to take these things with me and I’m not connected to the internet, but I need to be able to access some information on the mobile app. So that feature, mobile briefcase, is now going to support files. So beforehand, it did not. You could only pick certain objects that

that you were able to include in that briefcase. And if you needed access to files offline, you were out of luck. You weren’t able to do that. But now you can include files in your offline briefcase. So for people that are out in the field very regularly, maybe they have spotty reception, they’re not able to have a reliable connection to the internet. This could be a really big update to ensure that not only do you have the CRM information that you need, but you can also have the files that may be necessary to do your job available offline.

anytime you need

some other updates that we’re going to have on mobile and this one is going to be in beta, but now we’ll have the ability to use dynamic related lists on

beforehand. That was really just limited to the desktop experience or you know the web app. If you were logged in on, let’s say a tablet or something like that, but now on the mobile app will be able to use the full dynamic related list experience that we had before. So that’s a that’s a nice update just for.

admins out there that are building hyper personalized views for different record pages to be able to translate that directly to mobile love seeing that feature come and then another thing that I think is helpful is the list view interface is receiving a bit of an overhaul so now you can view up to 100 list views from that list you drop down and you can search those lists directly from that drop down so just some some small incremental improvements but

It’s something that most of us use every single day, multiple times a day. So to be able to have more data at our fingertips and be able to more easily search that data is a really big help.

Sam Donaghey
Zack, you mentioned Agentforce before, so we’ve seen Agentforce show up all over the place in this release in sales, service, security, even flow. Can you walk us through some of the interesting features?

Zack
Yes, absolutely.

There are a lot of Agentforce updates, so we probably will not hit every single one of them, but that’s okay because Agentforce is a little bit different. There are certain features that come out regularly with the standard three releases a year, but there’s also updates that come out throughout the year. So not everything is tied to a release, so we may see updates come out next month or the month after and not be tied to the next release. So…

Unsurprising there’s a lot of updates to Agentforce in this release and this is just really reinforcing this trend that we’re seeing which is Agentforce is showing up everywhere so all of the. Features and the products that sales force has we’re seeing Agentforce being woven into the fabric of those products and so for example you know not only are we able to have Service Agents agents for setup and SDR Agents but.

We’re bringing agents directly to the opportunity now to where salespeople can use it to help actually act on those opportunities and identify next best steps. We’re seeing it in marketing. We’re seeing it behind the scenes in different areas in the system. So that’s one of just the biggest trends, I would say, not necessarily a specific release, but we’re just seeing Agentforce pop up pretty much throughout the entire platform. So I expect that to continue to increase.

Now as far as some specific updates, let’s talk about a few of the different agents that we have. So first is the SDR Agent. So this is the agent that can autonomously reach out to leads in the system. And the goal of that is to sort of automate that initial outreach that an SDR might be taking. Instead this agent is doing that, doing outreach to those leads. It can manage email replies, handle objections, answer questions. And the whole goal is to book a meeting with a salesperson.

Well, this was limited just to the lead object in Salesforce, which makes sense because most of this initial outreach you would think goes out to leads, but there’s a lot of businesses that don’t use leads. Maybe they’re using contacts, they’re using person accounts, and they want to have the SDR be able to reach out to not just leads, but contacts and person accounts as well. Well, that support is now officially here. So you can use the SDR Agent with leads, contacts, and person accounts now.

So it really just expands the capabilities that we have in terms of who we can reach out to and which businesses are able to leverage this tool. In addition to that, you’re now able to actually test the SDR Agent. So beforehand, the testing process was a little bit cumbersome. You essentially had to create the agent and activate it and then generate a test lead and kind of see what happened, right? Now you have the ability to do this within testing center. So you can actually see the responses that will get generated without having to.

activate that agent in production, which is a big help because of course if you’re gonna have someone reaching out autonomously on your behalf,

you really wanna know,

Sam Donaghey
You don’t just want to burn through

Zack
yeah, is this generating the appropriate emails, is this the appropriate content? So having the ability to test that and see that I think is a big upgrade. And then of course the last thing with the SDR Agent is they’re bringing something called a control center to Salesforce, which is essentially just a view.

Sam Donaghey
and…

Yeah.

Zack
that you can see all of the different outreach that your SDR Agent is performing and where they’re at within those cadences and if that’s resulting in meetings getting booked versus falling off. So really just some nice upgrades to the overall experience of configuring and using those agents. On the service side, the Service Agent now supports rich experiences and so we’ll have the ability to build in some fancy rich components like carousels, list selectors,

Basically just a more rich experience compared to text only right beforehand. This was really just limited to rich text So you could do things like bold or italicize, but you weren’t able to put rich cards in the system now You’ll be able to do things like create rich experiences with carousels and selectors and cards and things like that, which is exciting I think that’s something we’ve we’ve all wanted for for quite some time. So to see

additional UI elements that we’re able to implement with our agents. Very exciting. And within that setup process of a Service Agent, what we’ve had to do previously is use an omni-channel flow to actually route that conversation to an Agentforce agent. So Sam, let’s say you get on our website and we have a chat bot and you start conversing with that chat bot. Well, at that point in time,

anything happens, we have to have something in the background, say, okay, Sam started a new conversation. I need that to go into Salesforce and I need to route that to the appropriate person. And in this case, the appropriate person is the agent for Service Agent. But to do that, we needed an omnichannel flow to process that logic and pass it to the agent. Now we’re going to have the ability to just do that natively. So we won’t need to build an omnichannel flow to route conversation to an agent. We can just automatically route it to the agent.

Sam Donaghey
Wow.

Zack
So that, it’s a small thing, but it cuts down on the setup time required to get an agent deployed and it cuts down on the complexity. So if you’re not familiar with Omni-Channel, if you’re not familiar with Flow, you can still get an agent stood up because now you can just route it directly to that agent as opposed to having to set all of, you know, essentially that piping up in the backend, right? All that plumbing that we need before is no longer required. It’s just gonna be handled on.

Sam Donaghey
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Yeah.

Very good.

Hmm

Zack
So that’s

a big update. And then I think the last thing here is email is now supported as a channel for the Service Agent, which is really exciting. So just like the SDR where I can outreach and handle those conversations, that type of capability, the utility there is not limited just to SDR use cases. Imagine being able to have an agent autonomously answer service emails. So you’ve got emails coming in, you got email to case, typically you take that case and.

a human would have to go in and analyze the case and respond to it by sending an email back. Well, now you have the ability to plug Service Agents directly into that workflow so that those agents can have access to your business knowledge and your historical case information and they can respond directly to the customer based on all of that context. So I’m excited about that. think that’s a really big update coming to Service Agents.

I do have several more updates if you want to go through it, but I wanted to give it a second to

Sam Donaghey
Yeah, the omnichannel situation. the fact that they’ve included this natively now, what does that mean for businesses that want to utilize these agents?

Zack
Email.

Yeah.

Sam Donaghey
Does it mean that it’s easier for them to not utilize a consultancy like Fast Slow Motion now and just do it themselves in-house? Or is there still some complexity included in setting up agents for businesses that don’t necessarily use a third party?

Zack
There’s definitely still complexity. So this is one very small piece of the overall setup process. So it just cuts out the configuration needed. Yeah, just a very small piece of the puzzle. Now in terms of getting that agent to actually do what you want and giving it access to the actions that it needs to do the job. Some of that you might be able to do is some of the out of the box standard components. Others may require custom topics, custom actions.

Sam Donaghey
Right.

a slight little part of the puzzle within the system. Okay. Yeah.

Zack
So I would say it depends on the use case, right? Each business is gonna have different requirements in terms of what they want this agent to do. This is a really simple use case and you are competent on the platform, you’re familiar with it, you’re familiar with sort of all the other tools that the agent can leverage. You may be able to set that up, but generally speaking, if you run into some complexity, this process for setting up an agent is quite different than many of the other things on the Salesforce platform. So using natural language to describe

what it is supposed to do, creating prompt templates that are invoked from different processes throughout the system, maybe by an agent, but it also might happen elsewhere. Just having that familiarity with how these tools work, I think would be a benefit to hiring someone like us to come in because we’ve done it several times. We understand where the pitfalls are. We can help you avoid some of the pain points when it comes to these implementations. And we may be able to help take your vision and help create that as a reality using these agents.

Sam Donaghey
Yeah.

Zack
you know, here’s the here’s the bullet list, right? Prompt templates. You can now ground them with external objects. So external object support coming to LLMs and prompt templates inside of Salesforce. There’s a new agent called the Deal Management Agent. This is for sellers and opportunities to help maintain pipeline hygiene, suggest opportunity updates, next steps, state progression, things like that. Internal agent.

help your sellers with the opportunity process, move deals along in the pipeline. Einstein Conversation Intelligence, which has also been called Conversation Insights, but this now supports conversation upload, which means if you have other recordings outside of Salesforce, maybe you didn’t have the agent on the call with you, but you do have a recording of that video call or you have a transcript of an audio call, you can now upload that directly to Einstein Conversation Intelligence.

and have it analyze and mine that information for insights, which is really, I think, a great update. So now you don’t have to rely on having that on every call.

Sam Donaghey
Wow. Yeah.

Zack
can upload that to a record in Salesforce. So let’s say you’re having a conversation with me and you get my contact record in Salesforce and you know, maybe it’s related to an opportunity. Maybe it’s not, but you want to have Einstein analyze that call that we had. We just didn’t have Einstein actually on that call. Well, you can take that video recording, upload it Salesforce and then analyze the information from that call.

Sam Donaghey
Yeah.

Zack
Which is great, right? Like you’re able to essentially get those meeting summaries, find the key insights, you know, pull down sort of the main ideas that we’re discussing those conversations without having to go through and actually rewatch the entire conversation.

Sam Donaghey
Yeah.

Zack
Awesome. And then two more things. one is a customizable progress indicator for agents. So if you’re talking with a chat bot and then that chat bot has to go and do something, I think we’re all familiar with the spinning wheel, right? We’re waiting for that chat bot to do something. Well, now we have the ability to give it custom wording depending on what it’s doing. So if I’m waiting on a chat bot to go and retrieve information from a knowledge article, I can have it say something like searching or reading or analyzing.

whatever that may be, if it’s going to go and it’s going to actually update something in the CRM, you know, maybe I can say updating or enhancing or whatever that is. So now we have the ability for each individual action that that agent calls. We can give it a customizable progress indicator so that it essentially makes sense to the end user what it’s doing. Right. So while we’re waiting, we’re able to get more context in terms of what that agent’s doing. And similarly,

Sam Donaghey
That’s pretty cool.

Zack
It is really cool. and along those same lines, this next release is going to do what’s called streaming tokens. And so if you think about it, and this would depend on if you’ve interacted with an Agentforce agents or not, but if you have, then you know that when you type a response, you’re going to wait for that agent to do something and then it’s just going to hit you back with the entirety of its response. So you’ve got this in between period where you receive nothing and then you just

Sam Donaghey
you

Zack
get a response, right? So now if you’ve ever used chat GPT or any of these other LLMs, a lot of them are hitting you back with text that is loading constantly. So instead of just waiting for the overall response, it’s streaming that response to you so that you’re reading it as it’s finalizing that response. That is essentially what streaming tokens means in this context. So Agentforce will now stream those responses.

Sam Donaghey
Right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Zack
so that you’re not just sitting there awkwardly waiting in the in-between and just getting a big bang response, right? You’re gonna get those responses streamed out to you over

Sam Donaghey
you

Well, listen, let’s talk about flow. Zack, can you give us a rundown of what’s new here?

Zack
A lot of updates to Flow, as expected.

you’re going to get a whole new look, for one thing. They’ve redesigned the entire Flow Canvas, so it’s a more modern design, more card-based. It’s not so different that you’re going to be thrown off when you go in and build a new Flow for the first time. But it’s going to look a little bit different, a little bit more modern. So I personally like it. I think it’s subjective in terms of what you think about the overall redesign. But I think it looks nice, looks a little bit more modern.

And in the same vein, the debugging process in Flow, the debug tool, is not only redesigned in terms of the look and feel, but it has a lot more added functionality now as well. So that new look and feel makes it a lot easier to debug flows. But the debug process is now much more detailed. It’s going to make it easier to understand what’s going on at each individual element within that Flow.

and you’re now going to be able to copy and paste the results of that debug, which that doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but imagine you are working on a flow and you’re debugging it and you just cannot figure out why you’re hitting this error. Well, you could now copy that debug log and let’s say you want to paste that into an LLM to help you debug what’s going on. Beforehand, you couldn’t really do that. You would have had to identify which pieces

of the error were coming out and give the context to the LLM. But now you can take the entire chain of that debug and send that off to an LLM and have that help you in that whole debugging process, which I think is a really cool update and maybe a use case that doesn’t immediately come to mind when you can copy and paste the debug. But overall, I think it’s a great help just to make that process easier, especially for newer users. Now, a few up.

other updates that we have coming to Flow, we are finally getting support for the time data type. So that has not been available in Flow before. We just had date or date time, but not time as an individual data type. So you’ll be able to work with time data types in Flow now. You can invoke an agent, Agentforce agent directly from a Flow. So there’s a new agent action that will allow you to immediately invoke an agent and send off information to that agent and receive a response back, which I think is cool.

Sam Donaghey
Very.

Zack
⁓

approval processes, those have been out, I think in beta, now they’re going to be GA and you’re going to be able to use flow to design and execute approvals and submit approvals, which is a great update to the sort of legacy approval process engine that we had before, which looked a whole lot more like workflow rules than flow. So much more modern capabilities using flow as approval processes on the screen flow side of things.

some really exciting updates here. One of the most prominent updates is you can now control the width of individual screen components without having to place them into a section. So you have a lot more control over the look and feel of your screens because you can control the individual size of every element that you add to that screen and it’s not restricted just to what section that it’s put in. So that’s a big update for

designers of ScreenFlow to be able to essentially design the look and feel and the experience that we want to have our users experience there. And in addition, we now have a new component that allows us to select and create nice looking cards is what I’ll call them. They call it the visual picker, but it’s essentially cards that you can put on screen where users can go and select from those cards. You can put custom icons on those cards.

Sam Donaghey
Bye.

Zack
So essentially what’s happening is we’re seeing the line between what previously would have required maybe a custom lightning web component. That line is getting blurrier and blurrier with all these updates that are coming to ScreenFlow, because now I can do things with ScreenFlow that just a few months ago would have required a custom lightning web component, or it would have required some custom CSS that we would have to inject into that flow on the backend. Now we’re seeing more of these updates

Sam Donaghey
Wow.

Zack
over time giving us more creative control over the look and feel of these flows, which I think is really exciting. And it doesn’t replace the need for Lightning Web Components by any means. There’s still a ton of stuff you can do there that you can’t do with Flow. But we are seeing updates continue to come to Flow that are essentially blurring those lines. You can do more with Flow now than you really ever could, which I think is really exciting.

Sam Donaghey
Yeah.

Do you think that’s gonna be a long-term move for Salesforce over time to continue?

Zack
I absolutely

expect the investment in flow to continue. And

Sam Donaghey
Mm-hmm.

Zack
one of the main drivers behind that is not just, flow is the declarative automation tool that we’re investing in, but also it is essentially the primary way to interact with Agentforce. Of course, Agentforce actions can call things like apex and, you know, other things, but most of these actions are leveraging flow. So when you’re building an agent and you’re.

Sam Donaghey
Hmm.

Zack
You’re non-technical, but you still want to be able to build an agent that can do things, retrieve information, update information. The mechanism that you’re going to use to do that is probably going to be flow. And so I think the importance of flow, it just continues to expand, which also means that the importance of good security practices, good development practices, creating things that are scalable and well-designed, that importance continues to go up as well.

Sam Donaghey
Hmm.

Zack
It’s always been important, but now you have a tool that is declarative that anyone can invest time in and learn, regardless of technical background. That is a good thing, but it also introduces a lot of risk, right? And so the importance of understanding how to build things in a scalable, repeatable way that isn’t going to break. mean, that just continues to be a really big caveat with

Sam Donaghey
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep. ⁓ Yep.

Right.

Zack
making flow available across the entire platform for everyone, right? Overall, it’s a very good thing. Let’s democratize access to these tools, but let’s not lose sight of the importance of good development practices and scalable design.

Sam Donaghey
Yeah.

Sam Donaghey
So Zack, in terms of flow, do you foresee Salesforce flows becoming more complex or more complicated for folks to utilize them? Or do you think that Salesforce will try to make it more accessible for users?

Zack
I think it’s a little bit of both. And I say that because we have seen investments in Flow that have allowed us to do things we’ve never been able to do before, making HTTP call-outs using a transform element, creating your own invocable actions and apex that you can invoke from Flow to do complex things. That is inherently pretty complex. So as these capabilities increase, the propensity for complexity also increases, but we’re seeing investments

on the design side of things that makes the flow canvas more accessible. It’s easier to understand what things do the way that Salesforce combines variables without you having to explicitly declare them does make it a little bit easier to use. But I think frankly there’s always going to be a learning curve with flow because you have to have at least a little bit of understanding or at least have a

bent towards programmatic thinking because you’re essentially coding visually when you’re working with flow. So if you’re not technical and you need to build a simple automation, you might be able to go into flow and create that. But if you need to create something that is moderately complex, maybe not even terribly complex at all, and you are unfamiliar with flow, you’re unfamiliar with programmatic

Sam Donaghey
Right.

Zack
I think the learning curve is still going to be there. Because you have to have a fundamental understanding of how this logic works, right? So yeah, I think we’re making strides towards making it more accessible from a usability perspective. But I still think in order to really leverage the tool, you have to work with it for a while or you have to come from a background that really kind of understands how these things

Sam Donaghey
Thanks for that. Did you have any further updates for Flow then?

Zack
think just a couple more.

We’re now going to have the ability to require files with the file upload component, which is great. So beforehand, you could put that component on the screen and users could just bypass it without uploading a file. So now we have the ability to require that so that they can’t go to the next screen until they provided a file. That’ll be in beta. So that’s not technically GA yet, but you can enable that if that’s something that you want to do.

The send email action within Flow is also seeing essentially a whole redesign. So everything is now in dedicated sections. It makes it a little bit easier to understand which things do what when you’re working within that action itself. So much more logically laid out, makes it easier to use. And then you’ve also got two, I think, very nice usability updates, one of which is an environment preview. So you can now take a screen Flow.

and get a preview of what it looks like on a small, medium, or large screen. So that can help you design for things like, if I’m constrained to a mobile device, does this look the way that I want versus I have this on a desktop window, does it look the way that I want? So the ability to just preview that and make sure that your design is going to look the way that you want it to look, depending on the size of device that the user is using. And then you also have the ability to view the outputs of actions and subflows

at a glance, which beforehand you would have had to click into an action or into a subflow and open it up and look at all of that to determine what that action is going to be outputting or what that flow is going to be outputting. Now you’ll be able to see that at a glance. And so it’s a small update, right? But that saves clicks. And when you’re working in multiple flows a day, multiple days a week, that really saves time over time and makes it easier to understand what’s going on.

So really two updates that I’ll mention kind of here as we leave and these are just user interface updates that make things a little bit easier. So we now have the ability to preview what screen flows are gonna look like on different device sizes. So you can do a small, medium or large screen. So if you’ve got someone who’s working on desktop or you’ve got someone who’s working on mobile, you can now preview what your screen flows are gonna look like on those different devices directly from

flow canvas, which I think is a great update to be able to visualize that and redesign things on the fly. Then you’re also going to have the ability to view the outputs of actions and sub flows at a glance. So before this update, if you wanted to understand, what is the result of this action or sub flow that I have in my flow, you’d have to click into that action or that sub flow itself and then do a few other clicks. Going to see exactly what it’s outputting. Well, now you’ll be able to just

see that at a glance by just looking at the element. So it makes it lot easier to understand what’s going on. So small little updates, but overall, you know, that can save time. As you are working in multiple flows a day, multiple days a week, little small changes like that can really.

Sam Donaghey
Awesome, Zack, it looks like Service Cloud saw a lot of updates too. So can you walk us through some of the big wins there?

Zack
Certainly, yeah. we

already talked about the Service Agent. So a lot of updates come into the Service Agent. We are now gonna have the ability to add conversational surveys to digital engagement. So imagine you are conversing with someone using messaging for in-app and web. That could be a chat bot on your website. It could be WhatsApp, Facebook, SMS, things like that. If you wanted to send a survey at the end of that conversation and determine, how did we do? Let us know.

if you have any feedback, things like that. You can now integrate surveys directly with those messaging components so that you can collect that feedback from your end user, which I think is really exciting. Knowledge, in the same vein as collecting feedback, knowledge now has the ability to support a thumbs up or thumbs down voting mechanism inside of Salesforce so that allows you to understand which articles are performing well versus which articles maybe need to be rewritten or have additional context added to those articles.

Your messaging for in-app and web now supports reCAPTCHA, so that can help prevent malicious spam activity bots on the internet from going in and filling out these chat bots and sending multiple requests. Adding reCAPTCHA now gives you an extra line of defense to help prevent that activity. Service email conversation summaries are coming to the system. And so this has existed. This is where you can use generative AI to create a summary of all of

email conversations that have been going on, let’s say related to a case or related to a record. So that we already have, but now it’s going to support the ability to customize the prompt that is used to generate those summaries, which sounds small, but if you have a specific need for formatting or for information you want included versus excluded, you weren’t really able to make any modifications to that previously.

Now you’re able to go into the prompt template that’s used to generate these responses and customize that to your heart’s content. So if you want it to spit something out in a certain format, if you want it to include other information from elsewhere in the system, you can go in and you can make those modifications. So that’s a nice update that makes that a little bit more usable, a little bit more customizable to different business use cases. And finally, two small things here. There’s new omnichannel reports and dashboards. So if you want to get an understanding of your agents that are getting assigned,

cases or getting assigned conversations and how that’s looking from a holistic perspective. You have some additional reporting and dashboards there. And then there’s a new estimated wait time capability for skills based routing and Omnichannel. And this comes in the form of a flow action. So there’s an action in flow where if you are trying to determine who to route a work item to by a work item, I mean a case or a conversation. If somebody is chatting with you on,

you know, any of the messaging channels that you have, whatever that may be, that work item, when it comes in, the system has to say, all right, who do I have available to route this to? And there’s all kinds of rules you can put in place, availability and how many items they currently have and should they be able to take another one on. But you’ve been able to do that in flow where you can say, hey, I need to go and check availability. But now it’s also going to estimate the wait time. So if you are having a conversation and

your in process of being assigned to an agent. If there’s a wait time associated with that because all the agents are busy or whatever reason, it’s going to give you that estimated wait time is going to calculate that on the back end. So that’s just a nice update, a nice user enhancement to make things a little bit more friendly.

Sam Donaghey
Very cool. Zack, what can you tell us about the experience cloud side of things?

Zack
Just a few small updates to Experience Cloud. Nothing crazy in this release.

exciting update is Agentforce is now available from the Experience Builder in LWR sites. So LWR sites are the more customizable, more developer-heavy experience that you can build. The other side of that is Aura, which is more drag and drop. You have components that you can add. So LWR is much more complex, but it’s much more customizable, right?

So now you have the ability to have Agentforce within that builder so that you, as someone who is building an experience site, can generate text using an LLM. You can ask questions about the security and different administrative tasks inside the builder. So you basically just have a little setup co-pilot inside of your experience builder when you’re building LWR. So important to note that that’s just for LWR, not necessarily for Aura. The other thing, which I laugh at this because it’s a…

It seems really silly, but I’ve run into this several times and I imagine many of our listeners have too. You can finally delete a CMS workspace. So beforehand, if you accidentally created a CMS workspace, it’s going to live with you forever. That’s going to be in your org. You can’t get rid of it, right? You have to go and say, alright, this is deprecated. Do not use, you know, whatever verb you want to put in front of it, but it just kind of existed there, right? Well, now we can finally delete those unused CMS workspaces.

which is really great and I think will help alleviate a lot of confusion for anyone who’s ever accidentally created a CMS workspace, which I know I have, so.

Sam Donaghey
Okay, so I’m

guessing there’s going to be a lot of cheering going on with that update. Was there anything else there? Sorry, man.

Zack
I know several people, yeah, yeah,

well know several people on our team alone that are gonna be excited about that, myself included. And yeah, one other update, again for LWR sites, you now have the ability to use the file upload screen flow component on LWR sites. You weren’t able to use that previously, now you can. So really we’re just kind of seeing an expansion of capabilities for these LWR sites and the ability to delete those old CMS workspaces.

Sam Donaghey
Very cool.

Awesome. So in Marketing Cloud, we saw some interesting things for marketing teams. What are

Zack
So I mentioned this before, but the trend here is capabilities from tools like ExactTarget and Pardot are now being brought into Marketing Cloud Advanced and Growth. So we’re seeing the marketing capabilities on platform grow every different release. So we’re seeing a lot of updates continue to be pushed out there that are really giving these tools feature parity with

the other acquired tools that Salesforce has had for more than a decade. So part of that is we’re seeing HTML code views for emails that will be available for users on unlimited edition or higher. So if you’re on UE and you’re using Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced, you’ll now have the ability to go in there and actually tweak that HTML code. There’s gonna be a repeaters capability in emails, which allows you to easily duplicate content blocks or reuse different content throughout.

say an email or a landing page. You’ll be able to build flows directly from campaign records in the marketing app. So that just makes things a lot easier. Essentially the whole automation engine on marketing cloud growth in advance is built on flow. And so there’s another callback to the importance of flow and how that’s being used throughout the system. But the whole marketing automation side of things is really built on flow. And now the ability to create those flows directly from a campaign just makes that

process a whole lot easier and more seamless. Opportunity influence is being expanded beyond the default data space. So if you happen to have multiple data spaces in data cloud and you need to be able to use opportunity influence across those data spaces, it’s no longer just limited to the default data space. You can use that across the other data spaces as well. We’re going to see enhancements to the web tracking setup process on growth in advanced. This process historically has required

multiple steps, multiple screens to click through a lot of different settings to configure. This is now being much more automated and Salesforce is really consolidating it just to a few clicks and a few screens. And so it’s making that whole process a lot easier to set up. There’s support for external tracking links. So you can generate track links to external sites.

There’s an action that you can now use with Agentforce to go and retrieve score information. that can go and analyze your lead scores or any of the scoring that you’ve created through your Marketing Cloud Growth or advanced tools. You’ve got the ability now, and now I’m switching over to account engagement, that’s Pardot. So within account engagement, you’ll now have the ability to mass delete visitors.

that are indicating bot-like behavior or false prospects. yeah, beforehand, I mean, you’re able to report on this. You’re able to identify visitors with bot-like behavior. So think, you know, people that are visiting 1,000 pages in a very short period of time, right? Crazy stuff like that. But you weren’t able to just mass delete them. Now you’re able to do that much more easily. So if you happen to have a problem with bots and you’re getting a lot of these visitors that are getting tracked, you can just delete those in mass without having to do that one by one.

Sam Donaghey
Yep.

Zack
And other thing, and this is a combination of account engagement and marketing cloud growth in advance. So if you happen to have account engagement, you also get access to marketing cloud growth for free. So there’s a world in which you could be using features from both products. And if you happen to use both products, managing the consent between account engagement, Pardot, and marketing cloud growth could be a challenge because they use two different consent models.

And so if somebody unsubscribed in Pardot, but they didn’t in something that was used in Marketing Cloud Growth, that consent might not be aligned. And so it might look like someone has opted in when in fact they’ve opted out and it just hasn’t been reflected in the other consent model. So now we’re gonna see those consent models achieve alignment. And so now it should be much more seamless between those two systems to understand if someone…

either has opted out, they want to subscribe, or if they’ve been marked as opted out manually by a user at Salesforce, we should see a lot more alignment between those two systems to make that a little bit more seamless and easier to understand.

Sam Donaghey
Zack, are there any features that you think are flying under the radar? You know, the kind of updates that might not grab headlines, but might be super valuable.

Zack
I’m not sure if this flies under the radar, but

alluded to this at the beginning, but I think a huge announcement is Einstein Activity Capture is moving away from storing data off platform and now emails and activity data. They’re going to be stored directly in Salesforce, so this has been a major drawback to Einstein Activity Capture for years and years, which is yes, it’s really convenient for me to be able to.

automatically track my emails and get that information in the CRM. But it’s not really in the CRM. I’m essentially just getting a virtualized window into data that’s stored on AWS. And I can’t really do anything with that data. So if I wanted to trigger an automation based off of a certain email, or I wanted to have other updates happen behind the scenes, you can’t trigger it because that data lives off platform. lives on AWS. Well, now with this option,

All of that data can become actual records in Salesforce. So those emails will live in Salesforce and you’ll be able to treat it like any other object in Salesforce. So you have the ability to A open up automations where you didn’t have before and B you can report on this information in a much more robust way. So on the existing iteration of Einstein activity capture, if you wanted really powerful reporting, you actually had to buy another product.

which would open up additional reporting options for you. Now, because this data is gonna be stored directly in Salesforce, you can just leverage your standard reports and dashboards to analyze those emails and those activities that are coming into the system. So you’re getting both the ability to trigger automations off of this data because it’s stored in Salesforce and the ability to report and build dashboards on that information that beforehand may have required an additional license. So overall, I think it’s a really

Sam Donaghey
Hmm.

Zack
It’s a big update. This is something that people have been asking for for a very long time and it’s finally coming to fruition. I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens because that is obviously now data storage. So if you’re dealing with millions of emails, that’s all now going to be data storage in Salesforce, which is of course its own sort of pricing consideration that you’ll have to look at as well. So I think overall it’s a very

desirable update, but make sure to consider your data storage limitations and how many emails do you expect to be captured and if that’s going to actually be data in salesforce now, make sure to just evaluate if that’s going to have an impact on your bottom line.

Sam Donaghey
Speaking of data, is the recent acquisition of Informatica worth talking about at all?

Zack
Yeah, I think

the acquisition of Informatica is interesting. So Salesforce actually tried to do this last year. They tried to acquire Informatica last year and it fell apart. It didn’t happen. And then I think we kind of forgot about it. And then all of a sudden this year we find out, okay, the deal went through, right? $8 billion acquisition, I think, right? And this is interesting on a few different levels. One is it’s…

competing a little bit with tools Salesforce already has like data cloud. It’s not exactly the same, like the capabilities of Informatica are not, you one to one the same as what data cloud can do. But there is definitely a little bit of an overlap going on there. So it’ll be interesting to see what this means for data cloud and what this means for how Informatica will be sort of layered into Salesforce over time. But I think the other interesting facet about this is like why Informatica?

Sam Donaghey
Mm-hmm.

Zack
Why did Salesforce purchase this company? Well, the increasing importance of data quality and data visibility as it relates to layering AI tools and AI capabilities throughout your systems is more and more important each day, right? And so to have a tool like Informatica that can help with that, I think that’s why we’re seeing Salesforce invest in it. I think that’s the primary driving factor behind it.

which is we know data is the most important aspect for getting AI to do what we want for getting AI to give us accurate reliable results. so Salesforce is investing in essentially the plumbing of this system, right? So it’s not flashy. This isn’t like a big fancy new tool that everyone’s going to see. This is, this is plumbing, right? They’re, basically purchasing the infrastructure to help make sure that these tools are going to have.

Sam Donaghey
Yeah.

Zack
quality data that they need to do their jobs. And so I would say this is maybe a less sexy investment compared to something like Slack, right? But I think it’s gonna be really important and is gonna have direct ramifications for how we leverage AI at Salesforce over the next several years as this tool is sort of broadened.

Sam Donaghey
Awesome, Zack. Well, listen, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Zack
Absolutely, Sam. Thanks for having me.

Alright Sam, well thanks again. For anyone out there who wants more information on the Summer 25 release or any of our previous releases, you can head to fastslowmotion.com slash blog and we’ll have a whole lot of information for you there including some highlights from this release and some of the most important features, both things we talked about today and maybe some things that we weren’t able to talk about. But look forward to that at the bottom of the podcast here and there’s a lot more information for you to review there.

Sam Donaghey
Well, that’s a wrap for today’s episode of the Fast Slow Motion podcast. A big thank you to Zack Terry for breaking down the Salesforce Summer 25 release and helping us make sense of all the powerful new features. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform and explore past episodes at fastslowmotion.com slash podcast. And if you’ve got any questions about what we covered today or topics that you’d like us to explore in future episodes, let us know at fastslowmotion.com slash podcast feedback.

Thanks for listening and we’ll see you again next time.