Salesforce Inc.’s shopping spree to bring artificial intelligence (AI) agents up to warp speed has made the company’s platform “increasingly complex,” according to a vast majority of architects.
Two-thirds said “Salesforce is becoming increasingly complex to work with” — indeed, at times overwhelming — following a series of acquisitions that include Informatica Inc., Slack, Tableau Software, MuleSoft, Own, and others, according to a survey of more than 600 Salesforce certified technical architects conducted by Shea Consulting and sponsored by Odaseva.
Unintended consequences of the buying binge has led to increased demand for specialized expertise. Nearly every architect surveyed said Salesforce is valuable, and roughly three-fourths deem it “extremely valuable and necessary.”
“I was not surprised by the results, given there is more complexity in the scale of the data as well as concerns over AI and security,” Odaseva CEO Sovan Bin, the first Salesforce certified technical architect in Europe in 2011, said in a phone interview. “For some Salesforce customers, who have used it for 15 years, the more advanced and powerful it becomes, it has grown complex — and these acquisitions make the product more deep and broad.”
One of the most startling findings from the 36-page report is that more than a third of those polled are considering leaving the Salesforce Architect role within the next two years due, in part, to rising competitive alternatives from ServiceNow Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
Confusion over Salesforce’s AI rollout and acquisitions has impacted its business and, ultimately, stock. Shares of the company tumbled nearly 8% last week after it provided a third-quarter revenue forecast that hinted at delayed returns from its AI investments.
An underlying certainty, based on the sentiment of respondents, is they’re bracing for a fundamental shift in their role and the market in the near future.
It shouldn’t be a total surprise, industry experts point out, given the torrent of AI agents flooding the market from the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Walmart Inc., ServiceNow, Box Inc., and dozens of others — not to mention constant upgrades from all of the aforementioned companies.
The architect’s role has evolved dramatically beyond traditional boundaries of single-cloud expertise or narrow technical specialization. Today’s architects said they frequently work across multiple domains, seamlessly connecting enterprise systems while serving as strategic advisors who guide organizational decision-making.
This broadening scope of their work creates new opportunities for impact and influence, yet also introduces significant complexity as architects must navigate emerging technologies like AI and increasingly sophisticated multi-cloud environments, according to Bin.
