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SalesforcePulse #2: Cert Updates, Slack AI, & the Builder's Toolkit

Hi ,

🌍 Ohana!!

AI in Salesforce isn’t just about smarter suggestions, it’s about smarter action. With the rise of Agentforce, evolving certifications, and increasingly modular architecture practices, the way we build and scale on Salesforce is shifting.

This issue of SalesforcePulseexplores that shift – from how the platform is changing to how careers are evolving around it.

Also, in breaking (emotional) news… Salesforce partner Tottenham Hotspur has just won the Europa League 🏆.

As a die-hard Manchester United fan, I’d like to formally declare this the worst timeline – but hey, at least one of our teams is winning this season.

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📬 TL;DR: Scroll-Starters

🔗 Salesforce's new certification experience is here – streamlined, smarter, and more candidate-friendly

🔗 AI Teammates in Slack bring Agentforce closer to daily work

🔗 Salesforce's AI data architecture shows how 100M+ records are unified in minutes

🔗 AI-assisted Salesforce integration shows how automation is reshaping modern sales

🎧 Data Cloud podcast unpacks strategy and career impact

🧰 Architect's Toolkit video delivers actionable frameworks from Dreamforce

🎤 (Coming soon): New voices and stories from the ecosystem

Let’s dive in!

📈 Ecosystem Pulse: What's Moving the Salesforce World?

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Salesforce Acquires Informatica for $8B: Salesforce has finalized its acquisition of Informatica for $8 billion, aiming to bolster its AI capabilities, particularly within its Agentforce platform. While this is a power play for Data Cloud and ETL, the deeper story is about AI readiness. Informatica’s metadata-driven automation and enterprise-scale integration pipelines give Salesforce the fuel it needs to make Agentforce smarter, faster, and more context-aware.

What’s in it for you:

For architects, consultants, and data-minded builders, this could mean fewer manual pipelines, better data quality, and more robust AI-driven automation in the near future.

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In other news:

Salesforce’s Certification Experience Gets a Revamp: Salesforce has redesigned its certification platform to offer a smoother registration and tracking flow. Expect a cleaner UI, centralized learning paths, and easier access to resources across your credential journey. (Certification Name Changes FAQ)

AI Teammates Join the Slack Channel: Salesforce is moving closer to real-time agentic work with new AI teammates in Slack. These aren't just copilots; they’re context-aware assistants that can retrieve insights, manage workflows, and support daily operations across teams.

Agentforce Gets Industry-Specific with Financial Services Launch: Salesforce is extending its AI agent framework to industry use cases, starting with financial services. This verticalized rollout signals how AI teammates will need to handle regulation, data integrity, and client sensitivity.

🧠 Expert Corner: What the Community is Talking About

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A quick roundup of practical insights, architecture thinking, and platform design strategies from across the Salesforce ecosystem.

How Salesforce Built an AI Architecture at Scale: A behind-the-scenes look at how Salesforce unified 1,000+ data sources and 100M+ records in under five minutes. A must-read for anyone thinking about scalability, automation, and system design.

AI-Assisted Salesforce Integration for Sales Teams: This guide explores how AI can supercharge Salesforce integrations, from smarter forecasting to automated sales actions — a shift toward hands-free pipeline management.

Design Patterns for Integration in Salesforce: A deep dive into key integration patterns: remote process invocation, data mashups, virtualized views, and more. Ideal for architects and consultants working across systems.

🎧 Inside Salesforce Data Cloud - Podcast: In this episode of the Salesforce Posse Podcast, host Francis Pindar sits down with Ian Gotts, founder and CEO of Elements.cloud. They unpack how Salesforce Data Cloud impacts planning, implementation, and long-term scalability — and what it means for your career path and design decisions.

💬 Community Invitation

Know a great resource, podcast, or video that helped you architect smarter on Salesforce? Help the Ohana community! Just hit reply, and it might feature in our next Expert Corner.

🧰 Tool of the Month

🎥 Architect’s Toolkit (Dreamforce On-Demand): In this Dreamforce episode, Salesforce experts share tools, templates, and mental models they use to design at scale. Learn how seasoned architects tackle decision frameworks, solution documentation, and communication across teams.

It’s a practical watch for anyone leveling up from solutioning to system thinking.

💬 Have a go-to tool or framework that helps you think, build, or communicate better? Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn - we’d love to feature it in a future issue.

📚 Exclusive Book Excerpt

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Salesforce Platform Enterprise Architecture, 4th edition

📚 Limited-time offer: Get 20% off on both eBook + paperback versions of the full title. Buy it here.

In this section, we explore an excerpt from Chapter 16 of this book by Andrew Fawcett

As AI becomes core to platform-level decision-making, understanding what Salesforce Einstein offers – and how it's meant to be used by different roles – is essential. This excerpt outlines the practical Einstein tools available to admins and analysts, from prediction builders to insight discovery.

Salesforce provides a number of services and features, both general and specific, related to AI so as to suit different types of users, use cases, and product features. Regardless of whether you are a developer, an admin, or an end user of one of the specific clouds (such as Sales Cloud), there is likely something for you. As you would expect, the options open to developers or admins help fill in any specific gaps where Salesforce has not delivered a specific prediction need. In this section, and those that follow, we will explore these services in detail.

For administrators and data analysts, these are the options:

Einstein Prediction Builder:This works with the data stored in custom or standard objects to look for ways to predict a given outcome, such as the likelihood of a given customer paying on time orusing historical race data to predict a race winner! The prediction is calculated in the background and the result is stored as a Custom Field that you can define further. You can configure predictions bycompleting a short wizard-based UI under theSetup
Einstein Discovery: Scans datasets that you define to discover patterns to drive information about business events (insights) or needs so that you can be proactive in resolving issues or making improvements. One insight might be a particular region that is not performing well in terms of sales, maybe due to certain products not being well promoted, consulting teams failing due to being overworked, or staffing issues due to market demand increases. Datasets can be from Salesforce (your Standard or Custom Objects) or from externally available data. For example, in Formula 1, you might use it to compare data from your competitors against your own. It also allows you to perform what-if analysis to determine whether changing certain aspects of your business would have the desired effect. Finally, as an advanced feature, it is possible to have your developers create Lightning Components that display insights directly while viewing specific records.
Einstein Next Best Action: This integrates with your user experience to provide contextual actions, depending on the field values of the record they have open. For example, you could automatically display the Give Feedback action defined earlier in this book as a recommended action, once the race completes. You can also use fields populated by Einstein Prediction Builder to display actions based on predictions; for example, creating a task for the pit stop team if it appears that your team is predicted to lose an upcoming race given the current time it takes them to change tires. Finally, it is also possible to use insights returned from Einstein Discovery to determine actions displayed to the end user.

Fordevelopers,these are the options:

Einstein Vision REST API: This helps you integrate image and character recognition into your applications. Image recognition allows you to not only recognize (or classify) a single item in each picture, but also detect multiple items, for example, cars and people. Salesforce provides some standard models that they have built with images they have obtained, though you also have the option to provide your own. Also included is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) service to extra character data from images or PDF files.
Einstein Language REST API:Thishelps you to integrate different ways to recognize free-format text in your application. This allows you to determine whether a phrase is reflecting a good or a bad sentiment from the user, or even pick out specific aspects of a sentence, such as a place or product being referenced. Using this API, you can discover the intent of such a message from the user, for example, as a desire to book travel to a specific place or reset a password.

Finally, there is an array of ever-expanding features built into Salesforce products, such asEinstein Lead and Opportunity Scoring,Einstein Opportunity and Account Scoring and Insights,andEinstein Forecasting.You can learn more aboutSales CloudandEinsteinhere:https://www.salesforce.com/products/sales-cloud/features/sales-cloud-einstein/.

Buy the book at 20% discount

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📅 Events in Spotlight

🔹 Agentforce World Tour & TDX London 2025 – June 11-12, 2025 | ExCeL London

Join the Salesforce community for a two-day event packed with keynotes, hands-on workshops, and networking opportunities. One of Packt’s most popular authors, Akshata Sawant, will be speaking at two sessions during the event. Whether you're attending in person or following the updates online, it’s one to keep an eye on.

🔹 Salesforce Connections (CNX) – June 11 and 12, 2025 | Chicago & Salesforce+ (Live stream available globally)

Join live or virtually for sessions, Agentforce demos, hands-on workshops, and interactive agent-building challenges during the Agentic Marketing Showdown.

🔹 Trailblazing Women Summit Japan – June 11, 2025| Streaming Live from Tokyo

A global virtual event celebrating women in tech and community empowerment. Hear diverse perspectives and leadership stories.

🔹 Salesforce Foundations: Kickstart Your Agentforce & Service Experience – June 26, 2025

A free, virtual deep dive into Agentforce for those using Service Cloud. Live instruction on setting up and deploying your first service agent.

💬 Want us to feature a virtual Salesforce event from your region or role? Reply to this email with your suggestions – we’ll spotlight the best ones in each issue.

✍️ Share Your Story!

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Have you navigated a tricky architectural challenge?
Designed something that balanced complexity, speed, and scale?
Whether it’s a client success, a personal breakthrough, or a lesson from the trenches – we’d love to hear it.

📝 Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn AND we will give away a free eBook for entry submissions.

🚀 Stay on the Trail

Thanks for reading the second edition of SalesforcePulse.

We’re already seeing a strong response from the community. Architects, consultants, and ecosystem experts are reaching out with ideas, insights, and collaboration offers.

In the next few issues, we’ll start sharing these contributions and continue bringing you practical content, community voices, and clarity through the platform noise.

Until next time. Keep building smarter.

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🗣️ We'd love to hear what you think of this issue.
Hit Reply to this email or DM me and share your thoughts – what helped, what’s missing, or what you'd like to see next.

Cheers!

Rounak Kulkarni,

Editor-in-chief

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