I’ve been working with Salesforce for about 20 years. That’s a long time to spend with any technology.

I remember when the big story was simply that CRM was moving to the cloud. Since then I’ve worked through S Controls, Visualforce, Apex, Lightning, Communities, Flow, Data Cloud and now Agentforce.

I’ve also sat through a LOT of Dreamforce announcements.

Some really did change the platform. Others sounded incredible on stage and never quite lived up to the promise.

So I’ve learned to be a little cautious when Salesforce tells us everything is about to change.

But what they announced today has my attention.

AIforce points toward a future where people don’t necessarily have to work inside Salesforce to use everything we’ve spent years building in Salesforce.

That could be a very big deal.

Think about what is sitting inside a mature Salesforce org. Years of customer history, relationships, business rules, security, automation, integrations and all those weird exceptions that only make sense once you understand how the company actually operates.

We built all of that primarily to help people do their jobs.

Now Salesforce wants AI to be able to understand it and act on it too.

That’s where I’m both excited and cautious.

Because anyone who has worked with Salesforce long enough knows these orgs aren’t perfect. Data gets messy. Automation gets complicated. Old business rules stick around long after anyone remembers why they were created.

Giving AI access to a clean, well designed Salesforce environment could be incredibly powerful.

Giving AI access to 15 years of technical debt and questionable data could be incredibly powerful too, just not necessarily in the way you were hoping.

And there’s another part of this that we shouldn’t ignore.

If people eventually spend less time actually working inside Salesforce, what does that mean for the platform we’ve known for the last 20 years? What happens to the enormous ecosystem of administrators, developers, consultants and products that grew up around the Salesforce user experience?

I don’t think we know yet.

What I do know is that understanding the business is going to matter more than ever. So will architecture, data quality, security and knowing exactly what you’re allowing an AI to do.

I’m optimistic about where this is going.

I’m also old enough in Salesforce years to remember plenty of things that were supposed to change everything.

So I’m excited.

But I want to see what happens when this stuff leaves the Dreamforce stage and gets dropped into a real Salesforce org on Monday morning.

That’s when we’ll know.