Top 5 Lessons from Leading Salesforce Transformations in 2025
Insights from Pracedo + Ascendion Delivery Leaders
In This Article
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Salesforce transformation is evolving faster than ever. In 2025, the introduction of Agentforce, the acceleration of AI capabilities, and rising organisational complexity reshaped how programmes were delivered — and what ultimately made them successful.
We sat down with two of our senior delivery leaders, Mark Jones and Marcus Blair Nyarko, to uncover the biggest lessons learned from running some of the year’s most complex Salesforce and Data Cloud initiatives.
Across both leaders, five clear themes emerged.
1. Clarity Early On Determines the Entire Trajectory
If 2025 proved anything, it’s that clarity beats complexity.
“Clients have to run the business and change the business simultaneously — and that tension is increasing.” – Mark Jones
“The most successful engagements were the ones where we invested early time in shaping clear outcomes, decision pathways, and responsibilities.” – Marcus Blair Nyarko
Both leaders emphasised that the top-performing programmes in 2025 were those that established alignment early:
✔ Clear ownership
✔ Defined decision pathways
✔ Tangible prototypes from day one
✔ Realistic expectations around pace and capacity
With projects running faster than ever — especially with AI-assisted discovery — early clarity consistently saved months of rework downstream.
2. Culture Now Matters as Much as Capability
Technology wasn’t the biggest differentiator this year. Culture was.
“Teams make faster decisions when they have something tangible to react to — prototypes, drafts, AI-generated starting points.” – Mark
“Organisations with an open and collaborative culture adapted quickly. Rigid cultures struggled even when the technology was straightforward.” – Marcus
The organisations that excelled were those willing to:
- test ideas early,
- iterate in short cycles,
- experiment with AI tools,
- and maintain psychological safety to fail fast and adapt.
In contrast, siloed decision-making and slow governance structures became major blockers — even more so than technical debt.
3. AI, Agentforce and Data Cloud Are Redefining Delivery Models
2025 marked a shift from configuration-first delivery to intelligence-first delivery.
“AI accelerated clarity. Agentforce allowed us to produce early drafts so clients could react sooner.” – Mark
“Effort is shifting away from manual configuration and towards designing intelligent behaviours, training models, and defining guardrails.” – Marcus
AI changed project delivery in three major ways:
1. Faster Alignment
AI-generated drafts of processes, user flows, and interactions helped speed up decision-making.
2. Smaller, Continuous Improvements
Clients moved towards incremental change instead of large, monolithic programmes.
3. More Strategic Consultants
Teams spent less time on manual tasks and more time on orchestration, validation, and ensuring ethical and reliable AI behaviours.
However, both leaders were clear: data quality, governance, and prompt engineering became non-negotiable.
4. Data, Governance & Ownership Are Still the Hardest Problems
Both leaders pointed to the same recurring reality:
clients are excited about AI — but not yet ready for it.
“Readiness is mixed. Expectations outpace foundations.” – Mark
“Data quality, governance maturity, and clear use case understanding are still the biggest gaps.” – Marcus
The most common blockers of 2025 were:
- limited client bandwidth
- unclear ownership
- legacy data constraints
- slow global coordination
- misaligned internal priorities
Pracedo and Ascendion addressed these through:
- AI-assisted discovery to reduce SME dependency
- stronger, lightweight governance
- prioritised decision making
- practical data remediation plans
- access to deeper engineering and data teams to unblock upstream work early
With Data Cloud and Agentforce maturing quickly, data readiness became the deciding factor between AI succeeding or stagnating.
5. Adoption in an AI Era Is About Trust, Not Technology
Change management evolved significantly in 2025, driven by globalisation, remote-first work, and AI-powered features.
“Users adopt what they understand and trust. AI adoption is more about confidence and clarity than technology.” – Mark
“Continuous engagement outperformed milestone-based communication.” – Marcus
Key lessons for adoption this year:
✔ Continuous, role-specific enablement beat one-off training
✔ People needed practical demonstrations, not abstract explanations
✔ Cultural awareness became essential due to global teams
✔ Transparency in how AI decisions are made built trust
✔ Ongoing conversations mattered more than end-of-project launches
Organisations that supported users throughout the lifecycle — not just at go-live — saw the strongest adoption rates.
Looking Ahead to 2026: What Organisations Must Prioritise
Both leaders shared similar advice for the year ahead:
1. Strengthen data quality, governance and ownership
This is the foundation for every AI use case, every automation, and every intelligent workflow.
2. Embrace a product mindset
Salesforce should be treated as a living product, evolving constantly through iterative improvements.
3. Invest in internal product ownership and decision-making
Fast, empowered decisions will separate high-performing organisations from slow-moving ones.
4. Build the capability to spot incremental innovation
Small, continuous improvements — powered by good data and AI — will outperform large, occasional transformation cycles.
Final Thought
2025 showed that Salesforce transformation is no longer about technology alone.
It’s about clarity, culture, data, governance, and a mindset of continuous improvement.
As both leaders put it:
The organisations that move fastest in 2026 will be the ones that stay curious, experiment boldly, and treat transformation as an ongoing discipline — not a one-off event.
Why Partner with Pracedo?
Pracedo is an award-winning Summit (Platinum) Salesforce Consulting Partner that delivers innovative Salesforce implementations to forward-thinking customers.
With over a decade of experience focused on Salesforce, we work with our customers to unlock the platform’s power through tailored implementations that facilitate achieving business goals and ambitions. Our talented team of over 80 Salesforce professionals globally means that Pracedo offers a boutique consultancy experience, delivered locally to you, with the breadth and depth of knowledge earned from delivering over 1000 projects across our locations.
Pracedo specialises in Digital Transformation and Change Management. Implementations and customisations include: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
