What I’m Seeing, What I’m Hearing, and Why I Think We Need to Pay Attention

As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been taking advantage of a rare quiet moment to reflect on the year just gone. It’s been a busy one for the Salesforce ecosystem, and a noisy one too, with a lot of change landing in a relatively short space of time. What’s stayed with me most isn’t just the scale of that change, but how uneven our collective response to it has been.

What things happened? Well, long-held assumptions were challenged almost simultaneously.

• Data Cloud moved from something you could choose to engage with to something you must account for.

• AI stopped being an add-on and instead began reshaping both how we execute the user experiences we design and how we deliver the software that powers them.

• Agentforce shifted the conversation around business process automation and the significance between probabilistic and deterministic outcomes.

• Multi-org thinking, packaging, and estate-level architecture moved from the edges toward the centre.

I’ve spent much of the year writing about these shifts, trying to make sense of what they mean in practice. Somewhere along the way, a question started to sit with me more persistently than the rest.

Are we actually engaging with modernisation? Or, are we more comfortable acknowledging that change is happening without fully leaning into what it implies?

To explore these questions I have turned to the available data from my LinkedIn posts. Paying attention not just to what I was writing, but to how people were engaging with it. Not in a performative way, and not to chase validation, but as a way of listening more closely to the ecosystem itself.

What I’m seeing

What I’m seeing is that modernisation content behaves differently.

Posts that question org-centric design, or that push toward estate-level architecture, don’t race across the feed. They don’t benefit from novelty or momentum. They ask something of the reader; a pause, a willingness to sit with uncertainty, and sometimes an acceptance that patterns which once worked well may no longer scale in the same way.

But they don’t disappear either.

Across posts focused squarely on modernisation, e.g., Data Cloud, Data Spaces, integration patterns, policy-driven design, engagement was steady and considered. Typically around the 1.7–2% range, which is healthy for this audience. More telling, though, was the shape of that engagement. These posts were saved more often, clicked through more often, and commented on in ways that suggested people were thinking rather than reacting.

Several generated well over 100 link clicks despite relatively modest reach.

That combination doesn’t look like indifference to me. It looks like people saying, this matters, but I need time with it.

What I’m also seeing

At the same time, I’m seeing how easily attention flows toward other kinds of content.

My most time-relevant post of the year was Dreamforce 2025 takeaways, it reached just over 18,000 people. That wasn’t surprising. Conferences create moments where attention synchronises. Everyone is watching the same thing at the same time, and social platforms amplify that effect.

At the other end of the spectrum, one of the most engaged posts I shared all year had nothing to do with architecture at all. It marked the last time I took the mic as a leader of the London Salesforce Admins group. It reached fewer people overall, but generated close to 5% engagement, driven largely by comments.

That contrast has stayed with me.

It’s a reminder that the ecosystem is more than capable of deep engagement, particularly when the ground feels familiar, personal, and emotionally safe.

What I’m hearing in the gaps

When I sit with those patterns side by side, what I hear isn’t rejection of modernisation.

What I hear is hesitation.

Modernisation content doesn’t attract the quick reaction. It gets bookmarked. It gets forwarded quietly. It gets returned to later. People don’t pile in with instant agreement, they pause.

And that pause is meaningful.

Modernisation isn’t a feature update. It’s a shift in how we think about data, automation, delivery models, and responsibility. It asks people to unlearn habits that may have served them well for years. That kind of change rarely invites casual engagement.

What I think this means

What I think this means is that we’re in an awkward middle phase.

The platform has already moved. Data Cloud, AI, Agentforce, packaging, multi-org patterns. All of these these are not optional experiments anymore. They are shaping what “good” looks like going forward.

But as an ecosystem, we’re still negotiating how ready we feel to meet that shift.

It’s easier to engage with moments than with foundations. Easier to react to conferences than to re-examine how estates are structured. Easier to celebrate community than to confront architectural debt.

None of that feels unreasonable. It’s human.

But it does carry risk.

Because the longer modernisation remains something that feels interesting but demanding, the wider the gap grows between what the platform enables and how programmes are actually delivered. And that gap rarely announces itself loudly. It accumulates quietly, as complexity and fragility.

Where my head is at as the year closes

Looking back at 2025, I don’t see an ecosystem that’s uninterested in modern Salesforce architecture.

I see an ecosystem that knows change is underway, but is still learning how to approach it without feeling overwhelmed or exposed.

For me, that’s clarified where my own energy belongs.

Not in shouting louder.
Not in simplifying things until they lose their meaning.
But in offering structure, language, and patterns that make modernisation something people can stand on rather than just react to.

One of the reasons I write these pieces is to surface patterns across the ecosystem, not just reflect my own experience.

How are you engaging with modernisation in your Salesforce landscape right now?
What questions are you wrestling with or quietly parking for later?

If there are topics you’d like me to explore in future Salesforce CTO Eye posts, let me know.
I’m listening.