Salesforce Admins are often the backbone of their company’s Salesforce environment, ensuring the platform runs smoothly across all business functions that use it.

But as technology advances, the role of the Salesforce Admin is changing.

What once involved managing data and handling basic system tasks is now becoming a much more complex, strategic role.

With the rise of AI and other advancements in areas like DevOps, staying relevant requires learning new skills and understanding the larger business impact of Salesforce.

In this article, we’ll explore the future of the Salesforce Admin role, what you need to know to stay ahead, as well as additional skills to add to your arsenal.

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The Traditional Salesforce Admin Role

Let’s start by looking at what the Salesforce Admin role used to be.

Historically, the admin was responsible for maintaining the Salesforce platform, ensuring everything from user management to data accuracy was in place. When the platform was first released, the administration of it was also relatively simple for anyone with a basic understanding of relational databases, which have been around far longer than Salesforce has.

Some of the core responsibilities of a Salesforce Admin included:

• User Management: Setting up user profiles, managing permissions, and ensuring that users had the right access to perform their job functions.
• Data Management: Maintaining the accuracy and cleanliness of data, managing imports, and ensuring data integrity across the platform.
• Customization: Tailoring the platform to meet business needs by creating custom fields, objects, and workflows.
• Automation: Building automations such as workflows and validation rules to reduce manual tasks.
• Reporting and Dashboards: Generating reports and dashboards to provide business insights and help leaders track KPIs.

The Salesforce Admin’s main goal was to ensure the platform ran smoothly, supporting users from sales teams to leadership. However, as technology has advanced, the role of the Salesforce Admin has shifted to meet the changing demands of businesses.

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How the Role Has Evolved

In the last 10-15 years, though, the Salesforce Admin role has grown far beyond its traditional responsibilities. With the expansion of the Salesforce ecosystem, admins are now tasked with much more than just managing user permissions, basic data and generating reports.

With the introduction of the Salesforce AppExchange, admins had to learn how to evaluate third-party apps, test them in sandbox environments, and integrate them without disrupting their production instance. They became troubleshooters and advisors, responsible for ensuring that new solutions fit into the organization’s workflows and brought value to the business.

Along with the AppExchange, Salesforce’s customizability expanded. Admins had to pick up new skills, such as Apex, Visualforce, and Salesforce Flow, enabling them to build more advanced automations and complex dashboards. Skills like Apex and Visualforce have often been left to developers, but today, they are essential to the modern admin’s toolkit, even if the admin just has a basic understanding of them.

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Over time, the admins' responsibilities also became more proactive. Now, they’re managing integrations between Salesforce and other business systems, ensuring data flows seamlessly across platforms. As the business landscape became more complex, they began thinking beyond the platform itself, considering how Salesforce could drive growth in the business as a whole.

Today’s Salesforce Admin is much more strategic. They’re part of the larger business conversation, often reporting to Revenue Ops or another strategic business function, helping to shape how Salesforce can contribute to the overall success of the company.

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Preparing for the Future as a Salesforce Admin

As we look to the future, Salesforce Admins must continue to evolve.

Two key areas where admins need to focus their growth are DevOps and, of course, the topic on everyone’s lips: AI.

Both of these technologies are shaping the future of the role and will be critical to staying relevant.

DevOps

With Salesforce being integrated into nearly every aspect of a business, the impact of changes extends far beyond the platform itself, and with the increased complexity in most Salesforce environments, even the smallest change can crash production if it’s not released properly. DevOps helps ensure that changes are made efficiently and without disrupting other systems.

DevOps refers to the practices and tools that help streamline the development, testing, and deployment of Salesforce applications. It combines development and operations teams to automate processes like version control, continuous integration, and delivery, ensuring smoother and faster releases.

When a new feature is released or an update is deployed, admins must ensure it works across the entire business, not just within Salesforce. DevOps minimizes errors, reduces downtime, and ensures that updates are rolled out smoothly.

As businesses continue to grow more complex, DevOps will no longer be a “nice to have” skill for admins. It will be essential. Admins need to be managing the entire release process, from testing to implementation, in a way that minimizes risk and maximizes value. Here’s what deploying changes looks like with and without DevOps:

Without DevOps:

An admin makes a change directly in the live Salesforce environment, skipping sandbox testing. At first, everything seems fine, but then issues start to surface.

The new automation conflicts with existing workflows, misrouting leads and causing delays.

Without proper version control, rolling back the change becomes difficult, leading to more downtime and manual fixes.

With DevOps:

In a DevOps workflow, the change is first built and tested in a sandbox environment.

Automated testing catches potential conflicts early, ensuring the update works with existing systems. Version control tracks the changes, and once approved, the update is deployed to production.

If any issues arise, rolling back is quick and easy, minimizing risk and downtime.

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Understanding Business Impact

Another key skill for the future is understanding the business impact of changes. With AI handling many routine admin tasks, the role of admins will shift from execution to strategy.

For example, when asked to add a new stage to the Opportunity pipeline, it’s not just about updating the field. Admins must consider how this change might affect reporting, existing automations, and even the commission structure. Understanding the broader business implications of their actions will set them apart as a Salesforce Admin, and being able to articulate this will make them stand out in your role.

In the future, the admin role will be less about doing the actual work and more about understanding and mitigating its impact on the business. This ability to think strategically will make you invaluable to your organization.

The Role of AI and DevOps in Shaping the Admin Role

Both AI and DevOps are transforming the Salesforce Admin role. Let’s explore how these technologies influence the future and why we must embrace them.

How AI is Changing the Traditional Admin Role

As AI becomes more integrated into Salesforce, many of the tasks admins handle today will be automated. Tasks like creating fields, building reports, and supporting users will eventually be completed by AI.

Soon admins will be asking a bot to create a new field or generate a report and having it done in seconds. AI will make these processes faster and more accurate, reducing the risk of human error.

But while AI will handle the routine tasks, it won’t replace the admin role. Instead, it will free them up to focus on higher-level, strategic work.

A Critical New Skill for Admins

DevOps is critical to get right because no matter how advanced AI becomes, it cannot fully automate the complex processes involved in DevOps and Release Management, nor should it. A human should always have the final say over a release because there are almost always external factors to consider that AI will not know about.

For example, the recent global Salesforce outage caused chaos for many Salesforce admins who may have been in the process of releasing new features into Salesforce. AI would not understand what was happening, and the release would likely have failed if AI had been in control.

In that instance, experienced admins realized they had to simply wait out the global outage before releasing their items into production.  

While AI might build components faster and with fewer errors, the real challenge lies in ensuring that these changes are deployed seamlessly across an organization’s various systems without causing disruptions and that users are notified about the changes and comprehend the impact on their way of working.

Salesforce Admins must also ensure any updates created by AI are stable, tested, and aligned with business objectives before going live. This means managing the entire development lifecycle, from initial testing to tracking changes to deployment.

Each release needs to be handled with precision, as a faulty deployment could cause significant downtime or negatively impact other integrated systems across the business, costing time and money.

DevOps practices help minimize this risk by ensuring changes are rigorously tested in sandbox environments, giving admins the ability to catch issues before they reach production, and allowing admins to release changes in a controlled way, such as over a weekend or after business hours, to reduce any impact on users.

In an environment where businesses rely on complex, interconnected systems, DevOps is an essential practice for ensuring smooth, error-free releases and maintaining the confidence of users and stakeholders.

Without strong DevOps practices in place, even the most sophisticated AI-driven updates can lead to operational headaches. By mastering DevOps and utilizing tools like Salto, admins can stay ahead, deploying changes more quickly and efficiently while keeping risks to a minimum.

Salto: A Practical Tool for Adopting DevOps

Managing DevOps within Salesforce can be complex, and without the proper tools in place, it can be tricky, even for the most experienced admins. Salto helps admins stay in control, and with a simple user interface, it’s never been easier for Admins to adopt a DevOps process.  

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Track and merge configuration changes across environments, ensuring everything is aligned before deploying updates. This differs from the old way of working with change sets, where changes from sandboxes would be overridden rather than merged.

Salto treats Salesforce configurations like code, allowing you to test, document, and roll back changes if necessary, a key component to any well-thought-out DevOps process. No matter how good your development and testing are, if things go wrong, the ability to roll changes back quickly is critical.  

Salto’s visibility into changes helps admins ensure seamless updates, minimizing downtime and reducing errors. By adopting tools like Salto, admins can take control of the increasingly complex Salesforce environment, deploy changes more efficiently, and stay ahead of the curve.

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Summary

As technology advances, admins must adapt by gaining new skills in areas like DevOps and AI.

These tools will automate routine tasks, allowing admins to focus on higher-level, strategic work, such as ensuring smooth system integrations, managing complex releases, and understanding the business impact of changes.

Admins who embrace these technologies and develop strategic thinking will stay ahead in this rapidly changing role.

Do you want top-notch DevOps for your Salesforce team? Better deployments and fewer clicks: Request a demo today!