Salesforce Admins Podcast Spring '25 Salesforce Features: AI, Flows, and User Management Updates
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce and the host of How I Solved It and Automate This!
Join us as we chat about everything coming with the Spring ‘25 release and what’s new for Agentforce and AI on Salesforce.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee.
Jen’s highlights from the Spring ‘25 releaseEvery year, Jen’s release readiness blog post is our most popular piece of content. So I thought I’d bring her on the pod to talk about Spring ‘25 so we can hear it straight from the source. She shares [number] areas where there will be big changes:
1. Agentforce for all with Salesforce FoundationsWith Spring ‘25, more orgs than ever before will get access to Agentforce for free with Salesforce Foundations. This is a game changer for smaller orgs and solo admins, allowing you to use AI to harness the power of the Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds to transform your business.
One thing Jen wants to highlight is the ability to add agent quick actions right on a record page. Prompting is an art, but sometimes your users just need the AI to do the thing. Now you can give them a magic button to give the agent the correct prompt.
If you have Einstein Bots, you can easily convert them into templates for agents to save some steps getting started with Agentforce.
2. Einstein AI for flowsFor the flownatics out there, there are a ton of new ways that AI enhancements in Spring ‘25 can help you build flows. You can describe what you want a formula or flow to do, and Einstein will build it for you. While you’ll need to go in and iron out the details, it can get you 80% of the way there. No more googling to look up how to write a specific formula.
If you’re like most admins, your Salesforce org is probably full of flows that you didn’t build yourself. With Spring ‘25, you’ll be able to get Einstein to summarize what they do, which makes documentation and debugging much easier.
3. User management made easyMeanwhile, there are several user management changes coming in Spring ‘25 aimed at minimizing clicks and making permissions easier to manage. The group summary page lets you view all the sharing rules and list views in one place, so it’s much simpler to figure out why someone can see something but someone else can’t.
4. Better screen flows in Spring ‘25Action buttons let you automatically trigger a flow when your user clicks a button, but what if you could pull up the output without any other user interaction? That’s where screen flows come in. For example, when your user selects a contact you can automatically pull up the associated cases or opportunities.
How to get ready for a Salesforce releaseJen’s advice for going through release notes is to start with your org. What features do you rely on? Search through the release notes for those things, specifically, and make sure you know what’s new and what’s changing.
Two things that will affect every org are security updates and release updates. These security and performance enhancements will improve your org across the board, so be sure you know when they’ll be enforced and how to test them. Remember, a sandbox org is your best friend.
There’s a lot more great stuff from Jen to get ready for Spring ‘25, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.
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Full show transcript
Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admin's podcast, we're thrilled to welcome back Jennifer Lee to talk about the Spring '25 release and all of its exciting features. Now, as you know, Jennifer is lead admin evangelist here on the admin relations team at Salesforce and host of the How I Solved It and Automate This video series on YouTube. She's also known for this blog post, which comes out with every release. I know you find it incredibly helpful. I do. Now, before we jump into the conversation with Jennifer, I want to make sure that you are following the Salesforce Admin's podcast on your favorite platform so that you never miss an episode, which could include really cool features like this one. So with that, let's get Jennifer on the podcast. So Jen, welcome back to the podcast.
Jennifer Lee: Thanks for having me, Mike. Glad to be back.
Mike: Well, it's almost spring. It doesn't feel like it where we're at-
Jennifer Lee: No.
Mike: ... but isn't that how it always is with all of our releases?
Jennifer Lee: I just want it to fast-forward.
Mike: Yes.
Jennifer Lee: Get me to spring.
Mike: Right. But you can fast-forward in your orgs because we're going to talk about Spring '25 release features. And Jen, back on January 16th, you put out an amazing blog post. I think it's the most popular blog post every year.
Jennifer Lee: Woo-woo.
Mike: So let's start off with going over some spring stuff and familiarizing people with what you do at Salesforce and go from there.
Jennifer Lee: Yeah, sure. I guess I could start with what I do at Salesforce and then we'll dive into the Spring '25 fun features. So, Jennifer Lee, lead admin evangelist on the admin relations team with Mike, and I'm also the host of How I Solved It, Automate This on our YouTube channel, and I write our mega blog releases for each of our three releases a year. And I speak at various Salesforce events, so you see me at TDX, Dreamforce and other community events. So let's dive into Spring '25. So I'm really excited about these Agentforce AI features come first because that's what we're talking about these days is Agentforce and AI. So really excited that folks can get their hands on Agentforce for free with Salesforce Foundation. So you can get access to Agentforce for sales and Agentforce for service and start playing around with it and getting your hands dirty. So that's pretty cool. And then also sometime in the spring release, we'll also add in the ability to have agent quick actions placed right on your record pages. So your users don't need to think of, "Oh, what's the correct prompt that I should use with the employee agent to get the thing that I want?" They can just click a button and we're just going to pass over that prompt into the employee agent for them, so they'll get a consistent response every single time so they don't have to figure out how to word your prompts.
Mike: This is so cool. When you showed this, because you sent around the GIF that you have in the blog, I was like, "Oh, this, I love buttons."
Jennifer Lee: Yes.
Mike: I love buttons. Users love buttons. People like to click buttons, and you get a sparkle little button. Like I'm telling you, because I also feel like when we talk AI, people just assume they know how to use it, and it's a little bit of an art. We're kind of early days of getting AI to respond the way you want it to, and the ability for an admin to set up a prompt, because you show this in the GIF, in the blog. The right wording, it kind of helps train your users how to be good prompt writers. I love it.
Jennifer Lee: Exactly.
Mike: This is the most exciting feature for me, I could talk about all day.
Jennifer Lee: And for those who were early adopters and they built Einstein bots in your org, you can now use that as a starting point to create your agent for service agent. How cool is that? That you don't have to start from scratch. You're like, "I have this thing over here. I want to make this into agent." Click a few buttons and then it just creates that draft for you so you have a starting point. So that's pretty cool. And then a couple of the other AI features that we have for those flow-natics out there.
Mike: Oh yes. Can't forget the flow-natics.
Jennifer Lee: Or even you're new to flow, you now have, we're going GA, so generally available, the ability to use natural language to describe what your automation should be, and then it creates that flow behind the scenes for you, right? That starting point, so that's pretty cool. So that's now GA. There's also, if you need help with formulas in your flows, you can describe it. You don't have to go and know what the right syntax is. You describe what you want and then it generates it for you. Again, that's such an improvement. I remember back in the day, I would have to go Google everything because not a great formula.
Mike: Nobody's a good formula. There's three people in world that are good at formulas and they're the ones that answer all our questions, but not kidding. Formulas and validation rules were always top performers in admin track for the longest time. I could probably bring those sessions back and they'd still be top performers. Everybody needs help. I still Google formulas for Google Sheets and stuff.
Jennifer Lee: Yeah. And I attended those sessions.
Mike: Yeah, I'm sure. Oh, man. Yeah, formulas are, that's stuff that I'm excited for Einstein.
Jennifer Lee: Yeah.
Mike: That like, "Oh, help me do this," and then it spits it out for me.
Jennifer Lee: And then another thing for flow-natics out there is imagine you're in a org. You didn't build the flow that you need to troubleshoot and you have no idea what the flow does. Well, now you can go in and with a click of a button, Einstein will summarize what's going on in that flow for you.
Mike: Oh.
Jennifer Lee: Yeah. So you don't need to go and open up each thing and try to figure it out. That is super cool.
Mike: I mean, to be fair, even if you were in that org and built the flow, but it was like eight months ago-
Jennifer Lee: You're not going to remember.
Mike: No.
Jennifer Lee: No, absolutely not.
Mike: Are you kidding? I couldn't tell you what I had for breakfast this weekend.
Jennifer Lee: Exactly.
Mike: Oh, man. That goes back to the other stuff that was always super popular at Dreamforce and TDX was like documenting your org. And the ability to do that, you think of that, Jen, then that's easily, you could spend a couple hours and get descriptions of all your flows and now you've got some documentation on flows started. There's probably a way to save that in the flow, right?
Jennifer Lee: Well, you summarize that and then there's a button that will save it to the flow properties. So as a general description of your overall flow, you can save it right there.
Mike: I mean, so there's no reason people shouldn't have this.
Jennifer Lee: Exactly, yes. All right. So we're going to move on to user management. And Cheryl Feldman and team continue to deliver and make lives of admins so much easier by minimizing the number of clicks they have to do to go and troubleshoot all things permission. So a couple things. A highlight for this one is at the object level, right, let's say you have users that need view access to all the fields in that object along with view all records, modify all. There's now a new view all fields permission at the object level. So you check that and that automatically sets all the fields on that object to view access. And when you create new fields going forward, it'll automatically check the box for those fields so you don't have to remember and go back.
Mike: Oh. That's awesome.
Jennifer Lee: Yes.
Mike: The number of times I've created the whole areas of fields and forgot.
Jennifer Lee: Makes me want to go back and be an admin at companies.
Mike: I mean, it's so much easier now. I feel like people in the ecosystem listen to our stories and it sounds like when our grandparents were like, "We used to walk to school both ways uphill."
Jennifer Lee: "Back in the day."
Mike: No, it really was, it really was hard.
Jennifer Lee: And then for permission sets on that summary page, you can now grant access to your permission set groups, and then you can also remove user and custom permissions at the permission set level. So it really minimizes clicks, like you're in the permission set, you can then assign it to permission set groups. You don't have to go navigate out of it elsewhere and set up in order to do that.
Mike: Right. That can be awfully tedious.
Jennifer Lee: Yes. Minimizing all those clicks. Love it.
Mike: I mean, I was wondering when permission sets and all of in permission set groups started coming out, you're from the old days of profiles and the millions of checkboxes, I thought, boy-
Jennifer Lee: Yes.
Mike: ... once they start rolling this out, there's going to be hidden corners of the universe that admins are going to have to search to try and figure out why somebody can see something and they can't. And I mean just to pile on, but thank goodness that Cheryl came along and was an admin and understood that. Because it was like, "No, I've been there and here's how this needs to work."
Jennifer Lee: [inaudible 00:10:40].
Mike: And it was from a usability standpoint as opposed to an engineering standpoint. It makes permission sets, permission set groups, all of that totally consumable.
Jennifer Lee: And I love how her group is really receptive to listening to admins like, "Okay, tell me what you're doing today to do this task. What are the steps? Why do you need to manage things in spreadsheets? Tell me why, so I can solve that for you in Salesforce."
Mike: Yeah. In fact, in less than a month from when this podcast airs, she'll be at TDX. And I promise you, those sessions are packed. The Q&A afterward, it's like you would think Taylor Swift showed up at TDX and you just turn and you're like, "Nope, that's just Cheryl Feldman."
Jennifer Lee: Yeah, so go and attend her Future of User Management session. Those, I've sat in on a couple of those and the number of claps and hollers as she's going through and saying, "This is coming and this is coming," yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing.
Mike: Yup.
Jennifer Lee: So a couple other things that her team is delivering in this release. On the group summary page, you can now view all the sharing rules and list views that you've assigned to groups. So all in one place. You don't have to navigate to each of those things, again, minimizing the clicks. And then also in the Salesforce Cloud Go, you can now view assigned permission sets and then monitor their usage in that tool as well.
Mike: Wow, that's a lot.
Jennifer Lee: And even more to come.
Mike: These are the highlights.
Jennifer Lee: [inaudible 00:12:28] not done.
Mike: You got to read everything, but you know. Okay, what else you got, Jen?
Jennifer Lee: All right, and then lastly, I got to rattle off some flow things, right? I touched on some, but there's so much more. A few releases ago for screen flows, the team delivered action buttons. On a screen, you can click a button and then it does some other things. You don't have to click next to go to the next screen. Well, in this release, they now introduce screen actions. So when you do, let's say you do a lookup on a contact, and as soon as you select that contact, it comes back with the associated cases for example, or opportunities. You don't even have to click the button. It does it for you. So that again, minimizes clicks. And then again, when you're working on screen flows, you want to give your users a sense of where they are in the progression of their flow. How many times have you worked on a survey and you're like, "How many screens is the survey?"
Mike: It's never going to end. It's perpetual
Jennifer Lee: Or I'm just going to quit because I'm done.
Mike: I'm done. You should have everything.
Jennifer Lee: Right? So now we can set stages on a progress bar for your screen flow without requiring a custom progress indicator that before you would have to build a custom component for. So now it's-
Mike: It's like path, but for-
Jennifer Lee: Uh-huh.
Mike: Okay, I'll take that. Yeah. I have wondered, because you don't know when you build... Most of the screens I build are simple because I don't have your skill, but I always wondered, you get three or four screens in. Well, I wonder if I could put a little cartoon up of, "Almost there. Keep going."
Jennifer Lee: Exactly. All right, a few more things. So when you are in Flow Builder now, and let's say you're managing multiple versions of this flow and you're like, "Well, which one? I don't remember if it was the previous version or this other version," and then you had to navigate out of that flow, a couple of clicks to go into another flow version. Well, now you can access right in that flow. There's a little drop-down and you can see all the different versions and when you click on that, it opens that up. So a lot of saving clicks.
Mike: This is cool. And you include a screenshot in your blog post. I had no idea I needed this until I saw the screenshot and I'm like, "Oh yeah, now I need this."
Jennifer Lee: I love just doing those GIFs because it really brings the feature to life. You don't just read it, you can actually see it in action.
Mike: Right, right.
Jennifer Lee: Yeah.
Mike: So this may be a silly question. No silly questions. I know what active means. I mean, that's the current flow, but in your screenshot there are some that are inactive and some that are deactivated. What are the differences in the statuses?
Jennifer Lee: Deactivated is probably a flow that you had activated at one point and then you deactivated it. Now inactive is a flow that you're probably just working on that you haven't saved, but you haven't done anything else with it.
Mike: Okay, got it. Just making sure. I figured somebody might have that question. It's like on deck, inactive is like a version but not ever been activated.
Jennifer Lee: All right. So for those who have a need to combine things, so in flow you can have a collection of records. Now in this transform element, you can now join two source collections into a target collection. So for example, let's say you had records that contain information from a third party system and they needed to be combined with data from Salesforce to make a complete record. Well, now in your flow you can take those two sources and combine them together with the transform element. So you don't have to go through that complex logic of looping through and doing all those things. You can take one element and magically combine them together.
Mike: Combining is good.
Jennifer Lee: And then lastly, for those who need to send emails as part of your automation and you need to attach something to those emails, well, you can now do that using the send email action. You can attach emails. Just know that there is a 35 megabyte max size and that includes the size of the file.
Mike: Wow, that's pretty decent. Google has like 25, so you should be okay.
Jennifer Lee: Yeah. Let's say you needed to send-
Mike: Like a PDF or something.
Jennifer Lee: ... a PDF of a coupon or something like that. Yeah, FAQs.
Mike: I like that. Boy, people. I thought 2025, we would be done with email by now. I don't think email's ever going to go anywhere. Nope. We're going to be emailing and attaching things forever. And I was just scrolling through your posts and I caught up to the little path thing. I really like that, and I like that it's visually consistent with what path looks like.
Jennifer Lee: And just a couple of things outside of those three major categories is you can now multi-column sort on your list views and related records up to five fields. So you don't have to just single sort. And you're like, "Oh, well what if I sorted by this field and I want to sort by this other field?" You can now do that.
Mike: Yeah. Oh, man. That's life right there. The ability to do that. That's the number of times that you've had to export list views or reports to-
Jennifer Lee: The spreadsheet?
Mike: ... something else. Yeah, I couldn't bring myself to say those words. Just multi-column sort. Yeah, descending here and alphabetic over here, makes sense to me.
Jennifer Lee: And then for your dashboards now, if you had a need to refresh a specific widget in your whole dashboard, you can now do so without having to refresh the entire thing.
Mike: So you can refresh just a component without refreshing the whole data.
Jennifer Lee: Mm-hmm.
Mike: Nice. That helps everywhere because that helps with the number of calls and stuff because then Salesforce doesn't have to rerun all of those reports.
Jennifer Lee: Uh-huh.
Mike: Oh, brilliant. That was always the big pain, especially you've probably built some monstrous dashboards and you get done, you're like, "Okay, I'm going to refresh this, go to the break room, come back in about 20 minutes."
Jennifer Lee: Right. Get a cup of coffee,
Mike: See if everything's back. And then it would always be the easiest report would be the first one to refresh. Some line chart or that accelerator bar and you're like, "Oh, that's not the one I wanted. Come on."
Jennifer Lee: And then I'll leave you with one last feature is, so now for your internal users, you have the ability to customize the welcome email. So it's not going to just be that standard Salesforce email. You can customize it with your branding, your instruction, personalize it so that the user who gets it, they're like, "I don't know what the Salesforce thing is."
Mike: Oh, that is 24 years in the making.
Jennifer Lee: It's the little things in life.
Mike: That was also the fun part of emailing a new user and be like, "You're going to get this email from Salesforce." And inevitably, unless you are sending it to somebody in sales, there was like, "But I'm not in sales." You're like, "I understand. You are also not in force either. So it's the name of the program. It's just like roll with things." This is awesome. Hey, one thing we haven't covered, and I think it's evolution because you and I grew up back in the olden days when we would print the release notes. Also the release notes weren't a billion pages.
Jennifer Lee: And you'd have the highlighter.
Mike: You'd have the highlighter. I had a whole user group presentation on highlighting stuff. I learned that from Andy up in Wisconsin user group. What's your tactic? If you're a new admin joining today, what's your tactic for getting through release notes? I mean, obviously nobody reads them all. Well, somebody probably does, God bless them. But to find the important stuff and the relevant stuff, what's kind of, if you were giving advice to somebody just starting out, what would that be?
Jennifer Lee: Yeah, so before I worked with Salesforce, I was a customer, so I was in your shoes. And what I did was I would go to the release notes and I'd search on things right away that I knew my company used. Things like flow, app building. If I had sales cloud, service cloud, I would look at those areas just to be aware of what's coming down the pike. And then if I had additional time, I'd look like a couple of the other things. But definitely you want to look at those things, anything security related because you don't want to be caught off guard of if there was a new security feature and you weren't aware of it. And definitely read through the release updates. It's also in your org and setup. It'll go through and highlight the updates and when they'd be in force, how to go about testing them. Release updates are pieces of functionality, things like performance enhancements, security enhancements that Salesforce is pushing through to the platform. So it's really important to be mindful of those because you are given a timeframe before that release update is in force. So you definitely want to give yourself enough time to test it out. In a sandbox, in some cases it might change the behavior or something, and you need to take action on it in your org in order for it to work once that release update is enabled. So you definitely want to get ahead of it and again, test, test, test, test.
Mike: Yes. Sandboxes are your friend.
Jennifer Lee: Yes.
Mike: Thanks so much, Jen, for coming on. This blog is just incredibly helpful as it is [inaudible 00:23:44]-
Jennifer Lee: I can talk about all day long.
Mike: I know you can. That could be a whole day seminar that we could create. Like, "Come see Jen talk about releases and flows," and it's like the AM for releases and the PM for flows, and there you go. We just have to have enough fluids to keep you going. But no doubt, and some of this, I mean the stuff that Cheryl's working on, it can feel like, "Oh, why are you guys getting so excited for that?" Because it's like the little things, it's smoothing out the rough edges.
Jennifer Lee: Yeah. I mean, the less time you spend on those things, the more time you can spend on the fun stuff, right? Building the new things for your users.
Mike: Right, right. Well, I appreciate this and I'll be sure to include a link in the post that links back to this blog for people. So how much fun was that to chat with Jennifer about the Spring '25 release feature? Seriously, if features were a game show, she'd be the reigning champion. I know, I'm sure you're probably nodding along, taking furious notes, but don't worry. Links to her blog post will be included in the show notes, which can all be found on admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript in case you missed anything on the podcast. Now, don't forget to join the discussion over in the Admin Trailblazer group, that is in the Trailblazer community. Link for that is over in the show notes. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.