I walked into my first Dreamforce as a skeptic. Salesforce has made several attempts at IT service management, and none of them have provided the technical depth needed by IT teams. After a single briefing on the latest product and then months of silence, I had filed the effort under another short-lived experiment. The pre-announcements ahead of the event made me reconsider.

But am I confident that this latest offering is competitive with market leaders like BMC Helix, ServiceNow, or Atlassian? My bar starts with incident and change management and the CMDB — if you have those capabilities, then it is practical for IT teams; without them, just not good enough.

I left impressed with Salesforce’s latest release and its projected roadmap through Q1 and Q2 of 2027. If those roadmap items are developed, implemented, and matured, then the IT service capabilities are well positioned to attract more IT organizations that have already invested in Salesforce for CRM. Here were my biggest “aha” moments from the conference.

Will The Interface Move Outside The System Of Record?

Software vendors have served customers for decades by providing the system of record where all IT work is captured. At Dreamforce, I saw how that decades-long practice is vulnerable in the agentic era. A keynote demo showed how an executive ran his sales pipeline from inside Claude, on a page he built himself by simply describing what he wanted. Salesforce supplied the records and the permission rules. Claude supplied the interface and a connected view of the information needed to make decisions.

If a business team works directly in Claude, doesn’t that make the system of record like plumbing and easier to replace? Business leaders stop waiting for IT to build reports; they build a personal view by just asking for it — no coding, no data team. IT’s job becomes keeping the records and permission rules accurate. A city IT director I interviewed had a large dashboard project planned and is now reconsidering it: “Maybe my city manager’s dashboard doesn’t need to look like the finance director’s dashboard, and he can make it his own.”

IT Service Built From The Customer Side

Most service management products began as IT solutions and later added modules for HR and customer service. Salesforce began with customer service and has now put IT service management and a configuration management database (CMDB) on the same platform. An outage can be traced to the affected customers so that the customer service team can warn those customers before the complaints arrive. Two teams that usually work from separate systems share one view of the same outage. While it isn’t something new, it is new for Salesforce.

IT service management and IT operations management are rapidly merging. A system of record holds only the failures someone has already reported. The warning signs sit in monitoring tools, and a team that wants to fix a problem before employees notice needs both. Salesforce has the pieces to make that connection. The CMDB and service mapping ship inside the service management product, and a release scheduled for this month reads logs from monitoring tools such as Splunk to keep both current. No customer I spoke with is using those pieces together yet, so this is to be verified in the future.

Who Is Keeping Track Of The Agents?

AI agents are being created faster than IT can track them. Salesforce now sells ready-made agents that business users can deploy without IT. According to one executive at Salesforce, customers’ agents appear far faster than ordinary IT assets, and the result is “a new kind of shadow IT.”

IT has solved this problem before. Untracked laptops and unapproved software were brought under control through an asset inventory. Agents need the same treatment: a record of ownership, purpose, access rights, permissions, and an audit trail of actions, sourced information, and decision-making. Most large vendors offer a registry for agents; each works best for that vendor’s own agents. But the tooling is still evolving, and Salesforce is working toward a single place to govern them all.

What It Means For IT Operations

The service management innovations I saw at Dreamforce and many other conferences this year are ahead of how many IT teams are organized to use them. IT operations needs new ways of working that do not exist yet, and the IT industry will need to develop new operating models to help us adapt to the rapid pace of change. In the meantime, organizations are building agents rapidly. Aren’t we just adding new complexity and technical debt to an already complex environment to manage? Maybe that explains much of the caution I see from clients not yet ready to move agents into production.

What changes are you making to your operating model, and how are you controlling the sprawl of agents across your ecosystem?

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