Writing
Practical notes on Salesforce, the CRM market and what AI is doing to CRM work.
Salesforce will bill Claude as its own line item. Map your AI meters before your next renewal
The Information reports that Salesforce will charge customers a separate fee to run Anthropic's Claude inside its apps, with no rate card published yet. Here's how I'd map every AI meter in an org, model by model, before that fee shows up on an order form.
Salesforce email login is now the default. Send your users to My Domain before November
Salesforce is making email the default prompt on login.salesforce.com and test.salesforce.com, with most production orgs switched by early November 2026. Passwords, MFA and API logins don't change, but shared mailboxes, UI tests and the people who still use the generic login page will feel it. Here's the short audit I'd run.
Campaign Agent is GA in Marketing Cloud Winter '27. Decide what it can change on its own before it goes live
Salesforce's Winter '27 Marketing Cloud release makes Campaign Agent generally available. Once a campaign is live, the agent can raise budget, shift channels, suppress sends and expand audiences with lookalikes, so decide which of those moves need a human sign-off before you switch it on.
Salesforce Agentic Identity is targeting November. Inventory every agent before the meter starts
Salesforce plans to give external AI agents their own registered identity and to bill each successful MCP or API call they make as a Headless Platform Interaction in Flex Credits. The rate is still TBA and Salesforce is now talking to partners about the pushback, so use the time to find and classify every agent that touches your org.
Salesforce is buying Braze for $5.66B. Don't freeze your Marketing Cloud roadmap while you wait
Salesforce agreed on 20 October to acquire Braze for about $5.66 billion, with the deal expected to close in fiscal 2028, which starts in February 2027. There is no combined roadmap or pricing yet, so CRM and marketing ops teams should keep building and use the waiting time to map who owns each customer message, from signal to send.
Voice agents are getting fast enough to sell. Decide what they write back to your CRM
Salesforce AI Research showed Launa-Omni, a voice model that forms a visible text reply before it speaks, and monday.com launched Harmony, a voice sales agent with native CRM write-back. As voice agents start handling real calls, CRM and RevOps teams need to decide what those calls are allowed to change in the record and how anyone will check it.
HubSpot now sorts every ticket by topic with AI. Fix your contact reasons before you judge your service agent
HubSpot's new Topics feature uses AI to classify tickets and conversations and report help desk and AI agent performance by topic. Salesforce teams can get the same view, but only if their contact reasons are clean, and that is the work to do before anyone decides whether a service agent is working.
Salesforce job demand fell 13% while Agentforce skills rose 63%. Plan your CRM team by skill, not by cloud
10K's latest Salesforce ecosystem report, covered by Salesforce Ben, shows overall demand down 13% and demand for Sales, Service and Marketing Cloud roles falling while Agentforce skills climb. For CRM and RevOps leaders, the useful response is a skills-based plan for 2027: agent design, governance, data and integration, and the business judgement to choose between options.
Salesforce says agents now answer the leads its reps never could. Copy the handoff, not the headline number
A Salesforce sales leader says AI agents have generated more than $88 million by contacting leads that used to go unanswered. Before CRM and RevOps teams copy the idea, they should design the assignment rule, the handoff record and the attribution method, because those are what make a number like that believable.
Docusign now lives inside Agentforce and Slack. Decide what an agent is allowed to commit to
Docusign's agreement platform is now native across Salesforce, Agentforce and Slack, so sellers and AI agents can generate, send and track contracts without leaving the CRM. Before that goes live, CRM and RevOps teams should decide who owns approved terms, where pricing comes from, and which agreement steps an agent may take on its own.
Your next support case may come from a customer's AI assistant. Decide how you will verify it
Zendesk has proposed an Open Service Directory so personal AI assistants can find and verify a brand's official support agent. Whether or not it becomes the standard, service teams on Salesforce and elsewhere should decide now how they will authenticate an assistant, which actions they will delegate, and how they will measure cases it starts.
Hunter brings ZoomInfo and Demandbase data into Salesforce. Write your outbound rules before it goes GA
Salesforce's Hunter outbound agent now has ZoomInfo and Demandbase as flagship data partners, with general availability planned for November. Before switching it on, sales and RevOps teams should decide which data it can use, what it can do alone, and how they will judge its work.
HMRC just picked Salesforce for a decade-long CRM deal. The part I'd copy is how it wrote the requirements
Salesforce announced an up to 15-year, up to £2 billion CRM agreement with HMRC this week. The public procurement notice behind it splits requirements into first-party core capabilities and optional third-party ones, a structure any team choosing or renewing a CRM can borrow.
Salesforce's password OAuth flow stops working on 20 February. Start with the inventory, not the code
Salesforce retires the OAuth 2.0 username-password flow for connected apps on 20 February 2027, and anything still using it will stop authenticating. The code change is the easy part. Finding every caller, and its owner, is the real work.
HubSpot just put a ceiling on agent spend. Every CRM team needs one, whatever platform it runs
HubSpot turned AI spend caps on by default this week, and ServiceNow announced alert, throttle and block controls for AI costs. The message for Salesforce teams is the same: consumption pricing needs limits, owners and a monthly review before agents scale.
Casey can now improve itself. Your team still has to approve every change
Salesforce's fall Service Cloud launches make Casey self-optimizing, with a human approving each change. The hard part is no longer finding what to automate. It is reviewing what the agent proposes fast enough, and with the right owners.
Before an agent explains why your KPI moved, agree what the KPI means
Salesforce is buying Loops to explain why metrics change, and Tableau Knowledge will feed agents governed semantics in Winter '27. Both bets only pay off if your CRM metrics have one agreed definition.
Stop treating every CRM AI job like it needs the same model
Salesforce just explained why Koa sits beside frontier models instead of replacing them. For architects, model choice is now a design decision: match cost, trust boundary and reasoning style to the workflow.
Winter '27's MCP Risk Scores are the security feature I'd turn on first
Salesforce Security Center now scores every third-party MCP server Low, Medium or High and can block the dangerous ones. If your agents connect outside tools, this is the control to set before you add more skills.
Your CRM is turning into a back end. Plan for the users who never open it
Microsoft shipped 30 Dynamics 365 CRM skills for Copilot and Salesforce launched AIforce. Both bet that people will reach the CRM from chat and AI tools, which makes your data model and business rules matter more than your page layouts.
Agentforce is on by default now. Here's the permission audit I'd run this week
Winter '27 turns Agentforce on in eligible orgs and is retiring the Setup off switch. Agents inherit whatever access their user already has, so permission debt is now an AI risk.