AI can certainly accelerate delivery, but it’s important that that is paired with accountability because without that it’s going to increase the risk and not reduce the cost. Yeah, that’s a huge point, right.

There’s so just to kind of stay there for a minute faster doesn’t matter if it’s blowing stuff up downstream or creating issues with your business or making your customers mad. So really making sure that we’re taking a beat, to make sure the AI is on point and doing things the right way.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped thousands of growing businesses build scalable systems on the Salesforce and HubSpot platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com.

Welcome back to the Fast Slow Motion Podcast. Today’s episode is for business owners and leaders who hear the words sales force, release and immediately think that sounds important, but I’m not really sure how it actually affects my business. Salesforce releases hundreds of updates at a time. Most of them don’t really matter to you, but a few of them do, and that’s what we’re going to get into today.

So instead of walking through release notes line by line, we’re going to change it up a little bit, do something different than you might hear on other podcast. We’re going to pull out five of the top five changes from the spring release that actually impact scale, efficiency, risk and return. We’re going to zero in on those and spend some time talking about it.

I’m not smart enough to do this, so I brought in the big gun to help me break this down. Zack Terry Fast Slow Motion’s Director of AI and one of the people closest to this work day to day. Zack, thanks for being here and bringing the big brains. Eric, it’s been too long. You know, I’m so glad to be here.

And I like this more bite size approach. You know, there’s so many features. It’s nice to just kind of hone in and get clarity and what’s actually worth paying attention to. So looking forward to diving in today. Absolutely. So you know it’s 2026. Let’s just start where everybody is. The headline everybody’s talking about. We’re recording this episode a couple of days after the Super Bowl.

It was all over the Super Bowl. It’s everywhere. It’s AI. Salesforce is adding AI now directly into workflows. So the idea here is AI can help builder update automations using your natural language. So from a leaders perspective, that sounds good. It sounds like faster delivery. It sounds like lower cost. Sounds like some of these AI promises being, fulfilled there.

What’s the real story? You know, it really does have that kind of ring to it, the promise of not having to really understand the technical constraints and everything that goes into it. But really the value here is what I would call speed to first draft. So it’s not a fully hands off. You prompt it and everything is done.

This is a way to speed up that initial development process, but it does not remove the need to understand what you’re building or to do the thinking that is required to understand what the business process is and how it should work, and defining what that logic looks like. Because ultimately, the outputs only going to be as good as the context that you provide it.

And we’ve we’ve talked about that multiple times across AI in action and on the fast Evolution podcast. So what Salesforce is doing here is introducing AI that can help generate or modify flows based on natural language, which is not entirely new. It’s been around for a little bit already in a beta format, but now it’s generally available, and it can absolutely reduce the time that it takes to build a flow.

Initially, especially if you’re you’re not really familiar with flow, but it can also be a little bit dangerous because it could enable you to build something and not understand if what has been built is, in fact, the right way to build it. And so I think this this could really get you 70 to 80% of the way there, but there’s still that sort of last mile that you’ve got to get over.

You really have to understand what you’re trying to achieve. And if the output is actually giving you something that’s high quality, it’s going to give you a process that’s going to achieve the results. You have to know how to test it. You need to be able to validate it. So there’s still some technical requirements there. But the idea that you can take a natural language prompt, understand what you’re going for and give that to Salesforce, give that to Agent Force and have it generate a first draft for you.

That’s a huge time saver compared to having to start with a blank canvas and design that from zero. So we’ve said it once. We said it a million times, right? This is not replacing humans. The human in the loop is still critically important here. But but another tool to help us, humans kind of operate more efficiently with AI.

Absolutely. This this is augmentation. This is the ability to have a human sitting there in the loop, doing the work, understanding how it works, and using AI to help speed up the process. But ultimately, the buck still stops with the human being. It’s still your responsibility to make sure that the output is high quality, right? The important thing here is these workflows are probably touching revenue, customer experience, compliance, core data that’s in your business.

So you really don’t want something to be automatically deploying automation that touches all of those things and potentially more without human review. So the takeaway is simple. AI can certainly accelerate delivery, but it’s important that that is paired with accountability because without that it’s going to increase the risk and not reduce the cost. Yeah, that’s a huge point, right.

There’s so just to kind of stay there for a minute faster doesn’t matter if it’s blowing stuff up downstream or creating issues with your business or making your customers mad. So really making sure that we’re taking a beat, to make sure the AI is on point and doing things the right way. Eric. Fast is slow and smooth is fast.

That was almost correct. But we’ll go. Oh, man. Let’s let’s let’s go. Let’s keep going. With with part two here, one of the things we hear, a lot from leadership teams is Salesforce feels slow and we don’t know why. So Salesforce did something in this release that might actually help with that. Tell us about it.

I’d say this is a big improvement for scaling organizations. So if you’re if you’re a small business, you’re probably not going to notice this very much. But if you’re a large enterprise organization that has hundreds to thousands of workflows and automations and a large code base, they’ve introduced tools like scale center and enhanced flow performance analytics that can finally give you real visibility into what’s happening behind the scenes.

So instead of having to guess when an automation is causing delays, or maybe you get a flow error, but that’s being triggered by other flows and there’s sort of a cascade effect. And it really is just untangling what is going on. Having more report ability and observability inside of these automations can help you identify which workflows are running the most, which ones are most prone to break because they’re getting more traffic than anything else?

How long does each step in a workflow take? So that you can optimize things when something’s taking longer than it should? And where is that performance degrading over time. So what does that mean? Like how does that translate into ROI directly? I would say it can reduce wasted time, and time is money. And so that can lead to reducing cost.

Anything that’s going to give you the ability to look at a report and have a quick understanding of what’s going on, instead of having to go and compile that all on your own outside of some central location, I’d say that that’s a win. So you’re going to spend less time troubleshooting ideally. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to solve the problem for you, but at least it can tell you where the problem is most likely to reside, which historically has been something that can be kind of difficult to track down.

So you can avoid those expensive fire drills. And I think it really comes down to being able to be more proactive instead of reactive. A lot of these error emails that you get or when things break, we’re reacting to it in real time. We get something that says production is down, right. What do we do? So if you have the ability to monitor these things in ways that we haven’t had before, I think it’s a net benefit to allow your teams to lose fewer hours to slower systems, or at least understand where things are likely or liable to slow down so that you can be proactive about it and put a fix in place before

it actually becomes a problem that you have to react to. We all know those fire drills that happen when something breaks in the middle of the night or breaks on a Friday, and now you’re spending all weekend troubleshooting these errors to make sure that everything can come back online. So it gives you the ability to prove impact as well, because you can compare performance before and after changes.

So if you if you get a problem, you notice that something is not running efficiently and you can go in and make a change and then monitor what’s happening after that change, you have metrics to benchmark against because you can say, well, it took this long before and now it’s taking this long. And so you can really prove ROI and impact as a technical leader, which is honestly been something that’s that’s fairly hard to do.

And that’s not a Salesforce specific thing. That’s just sort of the nature of the game when when you’re talking about it. And so any tool that gives you the ability to prove that the changes that you are making are having impact and driving results is a really big net positive. It’s a shift, right? That’s a shift from opinions to real data.

This is actually actually what’s going on. Amazing. Let’s, let’s go back to AI for part three. Number three that we’re hitting on here. We have been on the forefront of Salesforce AI. We’ve had a ton of conversations about this would be leading the charge with Agent Force. We’ve done a lot of projects, and inevitably every AI conversation comes down to what’s it cost?

How much is this going to cost us? Fair question. Absolutely fair question. What’s new in this release around that question that helps us answer it? Very fair question. And something that is, frankly hard to answer and prepare for. And it’s also a bigger macro level shift in the tech environment where we’re moving from this historical seat based economy, which is I have a user, that user has a seat, and I pay this amount of money per month for that user to use the system.

And when I grow, I add more seats. AI’s very different, and in a lot of cases it’s consumption based. And so certainly Salesforce has gone through a few different iterations of consumption based, going from conversations to what is now flex credits. But it’s always been a question of, well, how can I prepare for this? Or once I’ve implemented it, how do I know how much I’m consuming?

And how can I prepare for growing and increasing that consumption over time? Or maybe maybe I’m decreasing consumption. And so I want to make sure that I’m optimizing what I’m paying for and not paying for the wrong things. So we’ve got some new or improved tools, I should say, for better tracking. We’ve had this tool called Digital Wallet for a while, which first started with Data Cloud and then expanded to Agent Force.

The idea behind that is this just a graphical user interface that can show you different consumption patterns over time? Before this release, it was really simple. It was just here’s how many credits you have for data cloud, for data services, and here’s how much you’ve consumed, and here’s how many flex credits you’ve had and here’s how much you’ve consumed.

And that was pretty much it. It was just an overall picture of all of my credits and where I’m at in the process. So with the updates that we’re having now, we have the ability to slice and dice that data in more of a fine way. And so we can, out of the box now just see different categories of consumption.

So if I want to look at an SDR agent, a lead nurturing agent versus a service agent versus an employee agent, you now have that ability to say, okay, well, our internal use is outpacing our external use by some amount. Right. And so it gives you just a better bird’s eye view of what’s going on without having to go and track that down on your own.

And then on top of that, it has actually has custom tagging now. And so let’s say you have, 3 or 4 different departments that are all using the same agent because that agent has utility across those different departments. Well, maybe you want to get an understanding of how those different departments are using that agent. So you can say, okay, the sales team is using 50% of all of our credits compared to the rest of the departments, using the other 50%.

That can give you some visibility by using custom tags and tying that consumption to specific things. And I use Department as an example, but the idea behind it being custom is it could be anything. So any sort of business logic you have where you’re trying to track that consumption, you can create those custom tags, tie them to that activity and then report on it over time.

In addition, we now have a a brand new license utilization component. And it’s kind of funny, Salesforce has been slowly creating more modern interfaces in the back end. Obviously we’ve had lightning since something like 2015, and a lot of the back end has still been on classic, and we’ve seen incremental improvements over time. And so now finally, our license utilization view is modern.

It is a lightning component. Beforehand it would be in classic. I’d have to go back in the set up, go to company information, open up a classic window, and then sometimes it doesn’t load. Or when I click view all licenses, it opens up in a classic window. And then I can’t view it because it’s trying to render it in a lightning environment.

And so there are all these issues there. Now it’s actually in a lightning component. And so it’s not like you’re getting this magical view that didn’t exist, but now it’s modern. You don’t have to jump through as many hoops. You don’t have to go load classic to view all your licenses in your org. And it’s going to give you information such as how many licenses you have, who is assigned to those licenses, how many licenses you have free so that you can you can reassign those as needed.

So it’s it’s really nice just to see more control and visibility over not only current consumption and these, variable costs tied to consumption of things like agent force and data cloud, but also enhancements to the legacy seat based system so that we can see those licenses in a much more modern interface. It feels like this is something that the bean counters over in finance, the art geeks.

We’ve been asking for this for a long time. So good to see that Salesforce is delivering on it. I think I has always been kind of a black box and I say always, you know, this is still a new and new thing. It’s only been around for a year and a half or so, but being able to get that fine control takes it from being a black box and it gives you really confidence to understand, okay, I bought this many, I’m consuming this many.

And you have the ability to add some more accurately forecast and plan because you have that increased visibility. So that means leaders can decide whether they want to expand, adjust or pause certain initiatives based on actual usage outcomes. Definitely feels like a critical decisioning point. That’s that’s now surfaced that maybe they didn’t have before. That can can lead to increased adoption of AI.

So is that one of the quieter updates in this release is something Salesforce is calling Generative Engine Optimization, or Geo. What is that? Why should business leaders care? First and foremost, I think business leaders should care because buyers are learning differently now. So I know at least in my day to day, I tend to use a lot of these AI tools when I’m making purchasing decisions.

I’m having the AI do research. For me, it’s going out. It’s understanding what I am needing, asking me questions about it, and it’s going out and helping me discover those products. So whereas before I would go to Google, I would perform a search, I’d click through different links and I’d try to figure that out over time. Maybe I’m compiling a spreadsheet separately and figuring all that out.

Well, now I can handle a lot of that very quickly. And so it’s really important that these AI tools are ranking your results using their search mechanisms. So that’s one of the main things is AI tools don’t search in the same way that we would as a human, because I’m controlling what that search term looks like when I go to Google.

And I can change the term when I’m working with an AI tool, it’s taking all the information that I’m providing it, and then it’s creating its own query under the hood and going out and finding that information. And so the concept behind Geo, and if you’re familiar with HubSpot, you may have heard a term called ATO or answer engine optimization.

It’s a it’s a similar concept. Ultimately it’s all about having ranking for these AI tools so that when your customers or your potential customers are using AI to research the space that you are in or the space that you want to rank in, ensuring that those results are actually appearing in the AI search results and in the recommendations that it’s providing.

So you don’t think of Salesforce typically as a content management platform. So I imagine this has more to do with experience, cloud sites and things like that. It does. It does indeed. So Salesforce does have a CMS product and they have experienced cloud sites, which is really just a fancy word for a customer facing portal. Or maybe you have an employee facing portal for employees that are not Salesforce users, but they need to access information.

And so they’ve built a tool on Experience Cloud that essentially allows the system to generate geo for you. And so it’s optimizing that essentially with just the toggle, you just turn it on. It understands what your site is about and what you built on that site. And it can help build the recommendations that an AI would need in order to help your site rank when it’s performing those searches.

All right. Last but certainly not least, the least exciting, often the most expensive topic, retirements, things that are going away. What a leaders need to know about this release. The biggest thing I would say is check the release notes and just look through which features are being retired. This is kind of like when Process Builder was retired in favor of flow.

Very important to create a plan and make sure that you’re accounting for that. So biggest thing is first check the release notes. We’ll link to them in the show notes. Look through everything that’s being retired and work with your admin or your consultant, and make sure that you’re not going to be affected by those. The big reason behind why you need to do this is because if you ignore it, certain features could stop working.

Support also disappears. So usually when a feature is retired, Salesforce no longer supports the feature. So maybe it continues to work. But if you run into a problem down the road, you’re not able to get support to fix it because it’s not even in maintenance mode anymore. Salesforce isn’t doing any active updates to it, so make sure it doesn’t break.

Make sure you’re not losing support, and you want to make sure that any external customer or employee experiences that are served on something like an experienced cloud site continue to work as well. Because if that goes down and you don’t have recourse, that could obviously create a not a great experience for your customers. So from a leadership perspective, this is all about risk management and making sure that you are, designing and being prepared for the eventuality of something going away so that you don’t lose access to something that’s critical to your business.

So I think a lot of people see retirement and they think, okay, I’ve got it. I’ve got to do my my annual platform, housekeeping, go in and check the box and things like that. Yes, it can take that form, but it’s really important because if you do happen to rely on one of those features, you don’t want to be stuck in a situation six, 12 months down the road or that thing you’ve been relying on all of a sudden isn’t available anymore, and you’ve lost critical functionality.

Yeah, you definitely don’t want to wait too long. Then you’re behind the eight ball. You’re having to scramble critical functionalities offline. Your business could be in a pickle. So very important. Always pay attention to the retirements things that are going away. Exactly. Make sure to do that on it now before it actually goes into effect. Create an intentional plan around how you want to tackle it and avoid those emergency fixes that you don’t want to have to do later.

Goes back to those fire drill. We don’t have a fire drill. That was something we could have entirely prevented by putting a fire alarm in place. Absolutely, that we’re coming to the end of our time together for this edition of the Fast Solution podcast. Somebody listening takes only one thing away from this episode. What should that be?

Say that this release is really about maturity. And so it’s maybe not as exciting as some flashy new features like Agent Force when it was first released a year and a half ago. But what we’re seeing are all of the things necessary to go into a mature market. We’re creating a lot more tooling around observability. Automation is getting more visibility than it’s ever had.

We’ve got tools for governance, especially around AI, to make sure that we understand where our AI tools are being used and how much they’re consuming and who’s using the most, so that we can plan and make sure that we account for future needs. And we also see intentional design around scalability, creating tooling that allows us to plan for and test very large scale problems to ensure that the platform isn’t going to break.

So when we look at this particular release and this move towards maturity, it’s really about making sure that we’re using the right features to ensure our systems are predictable, measurable and more resilient as the business grows super strong. Take aways before we wrap up, we always like to end with a question, as we do on every episode of the podcast.

If you have one word of wisdom or piece of advice that’s had a real impact on how you personally think about tech leadership or building scalable systems, would you like to share that with our audience right now? Well, this will come as no surprise because it’s straight out of the scalable business framework, which that’s my first advice is go get the scale, read the book.

Yeah, yeah. But if you haven’t yet read the book. Yeah, go check it out. Go check it out Amazon bestseller. So right out of that process, right out of the scalable business framework is this concept of defining processes before creating automation. And as we catapult into more and more of an AI first world where we expect these systems to perform for us, we first have to be clear about what we do and how we do it.

And I’m talking about a business. If you if you run a business, you need to know what do you do and how do you do it. And only once that’s been articulated should we be getting into automation in AI tooling. So make sure you understand your business. Make sure you understand your processes, make sure you can articulate them.

And then I can help multiply that. Automation can help multiply that spot on. If today’s conversation has sparked any questions about performance AI readiness, whether or not your Salesforce setup is actually helping you scale instead of slowing you down, that’s that’s what we’re here for. That’s where we spend our time. That’s how we can help you. So let’s cut through the noise of the Salesforce release.

We’ve pulled together some free related resources on the episode page. You can see them in the show notes. We talked about the scalable business Framework book. We’re going to put a link where you can grab a copy of that as well from Amazon. And as always, you want to reach us fastslowmotion.com/podcast. Thanks for listening to this week’s episode.

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Definitely hit that link. Let us know your feedback. Zach, thank you for all of your help on this one. In your wisdom. We’ll see you guys next time. All right. Thank you, Eric.