The Real Messages of TDX 2025

Secret Agent Man ...

I admit to being dense at times, but two days of TDX was enough hammering to make a couple of things clear to me:

1. They want Agentforce everywhere now.

2. This coming Dreamforce, best but iffy case, or the one after it, more likely case, Salesforce is going to come out and say Agentforce is the new Salesforce UI.

Start getting ready now.

Agentforce Everywhere

There was frequent mentions that Agentforce is accessible via an API, and that you can embed Agentforce in web sites, applications, etc. In fact, we saw a demo where they scan your web page, propose potential agent designs, and then create the agent for you. It’s an internal prototype, to be sure, but it speaks not just to the ambition Salesforce has, but the effort they’re putting into it.

Agentforce, Your New UI

The second thing I saw coming out of TDX was the intent to make Agentforce capable of handling all the tasks users perform in Salesforce and gradually replace the existing UI with an agentic one.

Salesforce has gotten a quarter of a century out of essentially a forms on tables UI. Lightning just allowed you to cram more forms and more tables into the UI, but didn’t fundamentally change things.

This doesn’t mean the existing UI is going to go away anytime soon. Heck, you can still pop into classic today, if you please. It will be a few years before Agentforce has all the machinery in place to take over and become the primary and default UI.

But it is coming.

How would this even work, though?

The question is natural and valid because the current Agentforce UI isn’t capable of grabbing the steering wheel. There are really two big efforts underway to make this possible.

The first is the work on the Atlas Reasoning Engine, which, let’s be clear, is a typically over the top Salesforce name¹ for an AI service. The goal is to allow the engine to discern the user’s intent, formulate a plan to do what the user asks, and then execute the plan to satisfy the user’s request. What we see now in Agentforce is an early version of that.

The second is to allow agents to present a more sophisticated and varied UI than lightly formatted text. The goal is to allow Flows, LWCs, and, I hope, OmniScripts to show up in an agent when they’re needed. Instead of agents being inside lightning apps, non-agent UIs will appear inside of agentic apps.

The logical questions I have are:

1. Can Salesforce pull this off for real (as opposed to for marketing)?

2. What does pulling it off mean?

3. Even if they pull it off, how long will it take to actually be generally adopted by almost all customers?

I don’t have answers, but my guess are:

1. If they sustain this level of effort, yes.

2. Changing the conversation about Salesforce to be about this.

3. A decade. Vendors move much faster than enterprise customers.

I have two pieces of advice on how to listen and how to act.

Listen: watch and listen to what Salesforce says and does with “Agentforce first and everywhere” in mind. See if that causes what you hear to make more sense (or less). If it does, you’re ahead of the game.

Act:

1. Pay attention to the following:

• Ability to incorporate complex information, complex UIs, and complex² document types into agents.

• Changes and additions to how agents work, especially around topics and orchestration of topics.

• Tools for developing, deploying, and testing agents far more easily than you can now.

2. Learn, learn, learn. Things are going to start coming at us fast and unexpectedly, and now’s not the time to fall behind.

More on this later …

1. Atlas either carried the world on his back, or shrugged, depending upon your literary preference. Or was the rocket that got Apollo partway to the moon.

Edit: I was tired when I wrote this. Atlas was part of the space program and launched the Gemini series spacecraft as the first step towards a lunar landing. But it did not actually launch the Apollo series spacecraft.

2. Original post said “complete” which kills the patten I meant to use.