Salesforce is the undisputed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market leader, trusted by businesses of all sizes for the last 20 years—and for good reason!
Salesforce’s entire portfolio of CRM products and services unites your company’s sales, services, marketing, commerce, and IT teams to offer a single shared view of your customers using Generative AI and real-time, actionable data. This ensures that customer information—from tech support chats to lead follow-ups to customer transactions—flows throughout your company in real time.
Since enabling customers to succeed in their businesses is one of Salesforce’s core values, the CRM giant attempts to deliver innovative features to their clients three times a year. These updates come in the form of seasonal releases—Spring, Summer, and Winter. With each release, these upgrades are automatically delivered in real-time, with just 5 minutes of scheduled maintenance time. Salesforce releases these updates in the cloud so that customers can continue running the same version of Salesforce, complete with all the latest features, without worrying about updating hardware or software.
However, keeping up with each and every update can be overwhelming, and browsing through release notes to understand how exactly they benefit your business, cumbersome.
Which is why this blog is for you.
Here, we break down the release notes on Salesforce Winter ’25 updates and let you in on the latest enhancements and updates this world-class CRM has to offer.
Salesforce Winter ’25 Release Highlights
The main focus of Salesforce’s exciting new rollout this winter is Agentforce—Salesforce’s latest AI platform that allows organisations to build and use AI agents to automate tasks across various business functions. Agentforce is also the world’s first and only low-code platform for building and customising autonomous agents. It can help you scale your workforce and adapt to any use case to get more work done.
The Winter ’25 Release also includes enhancements to Salesforce Data Cloud that leverage AI-powered capabilities to deliver trusted, secure, and relevant outcomes, based on your company data, without expensive model training. You can also make use of enhanced workflows and insights and seamlessly integrate external predictive models with Bring Your Own Model (BYOM).
Other new features have also been introduced to help you connect your Salesforce Data Cloud to external applications via Salesforce’s Einstein AI platform.
These changes have recently been rolled out in phases, with different Salesforce instances receiving these updates on various dates. The Winter ’25 updates and new features are already available since October 14, 2024. The main release weekends were:
- September 6, 2024
- October 5, 2024
- October 12, 2024
You can check the specific release date for your Salesforce instance by visiting the Salesforce Maintenance Calendar and looking up your instance. The first set of upgrades typically happens on sandbox instances 4-6 weeks before a release goes into production. You can find both the sandbox release dates and production release dates for your instance for the next two or three releases in your maintenance schedule.
If you are unsure how to look up your releases or require assistance planning for the Winter’ 25 updates, let a trusted Salesforce consulting partner like Corptec Technology Partners do the heavy lifting for you!
Let’s now take a detailed look at the key changes in this release.
Salesforce Winter ’25 Release Notes—All You Need to Know!
1. Agentforce AI Agents
Agentforce SDR Agent: Salesforce Agentforce introduces an autonomous AI SDR agent for Salesforce Sales Cloud that can automate the lead engagement, prospect outreach, and lead qualification processes. The agent can send introduction emails, answer questions, handle objections, and schedule meetings on behalf of your sales and business development teams. The best part about this feature is that the SDR agent will be available 24/7 to nurture your sales pipeline.
Agentforce Service Agent: Salesforce Agentforce has also introduced a new AI service agent for Salesforce Service Cloud that provides human-like customer service interactions across various channels using pre-built templates and reliable data from your systems. As a trusted AI team member for every service experience, Salesforce Agentforce Service Agent can help companies engage with customers round-the-clock and resolve customer service tickets faster. The low-code agent can also be customised to match your brand’s voice.
2. Data Cloud Features
With over 200 new pre-built Salesforce connectors, Salesforce Data Cloud now allows businesses to unlock and bring trapped data from external apps into Salesforce Data Cloud in real time. Whether they are batch or streaming data, you can now connect all your data sources, harmonise your data to a standard data model, use Salesforce AI to predict behaviour, and distribute verified data to multiple sources.
Data Cloud in Sandbox Environments now lets you build, test, and deploy Salesforce Data Cloud in a secure environment to ensure quality. Its Data Mask feature will ensure that the sandbox data is automatically masked and desensitised before syncing to and from Data Cloud.
With the sub-second real-time data layer feature, you can also segment and activate your data within milliseconds to use in various channels across your Salesforce ecosystem and create personalised customer experiences.
3. Quota Planning Tool
With the new Quota Attainment Planning tool released this Winter, sales teams can easily build and manage quota plans from the ground up based on sales territories, from within their Salesforce CRM. This not only improves efficiency, transparency, and speed but also provides sales reps with a running total of their quarterly account plans while allowing for adjustments at the plan or account level.
4. Employee Service Tool
To help companies streamline employee support processes, Salesforce Winter ’25 Release is now offering a new AI-powered solution. This employee service solution equips every employee with AI-powered processes and tools. It also enables seamless integrations with departmental systems to help them find the right answers at every step of their journey and take action from one unified system.
5. Dynamic Content Tool
The latest feature in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the Rule-Based Dynamic Content. This feature lets you build more personalised emails by enabling you to customise emails based on known attributes. By also helping you generate dynamic content for the email body, subject line, and pre-header, it contributes to richer customer experiences.
6. Commerce Bundles
Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s latest Commerce Bundles empower you to boost revenue, improve inventory turnover, and seamlessly manage orders throughout the entire commerce ops lifecycle. You can make updates to inventory right within the inventory app. This includes creating new inventory records and editing existing records within the application, without the need for a developer.
7. Invoice Management Tool
Salesforce Revenue Cloud now offers a new Invoice Management tool that automates billing for one-time and recurring charges at scale while streamlining the interface between Salesforce and your ERP. Salesforce Revenue Cloud Usage Management also offers options to create a rate card and rate card entry as well as manage and customise metered usage products—from selection through to post-purchase adjustments—via a flexible subscription manager.
8. Opportunity Management Tool
The Recruitment Inquiry and Opportunity Management features in Salesforce Education Cloud now keep prospective students engaged with automated campaigns. The AI-powered tool also helps in seamlessly forecasting revenue for students and assigning opportunities to staff.
9. Communication-Related Enhancements
With the new Salesforce Data Cloud updates, comm teams can generate a robust customer view by ingesting actionable data from multiple back-office systems. You can ensure console views are enriched so that any team can take action. Additionally, you can generate complex enterprise quotes faster and more accurately with Salesforce Einstein Quick Quote and rapidly configure pricing and offers with a drag-and-drop pricing editor built on the Agentforce Action Platform.
10. Third-Party Enhancements
Salesforce Winter ’25 Release has also introduced a host of new features for third-party integrations.
For example, Mulesoft Direct for Data Cloud now incorporates Salesforce AI with your organisation’s knowledge by surfacing unstructured data into Data Cloud.
On the other hand, Event Triggers for Slack help sellers with real-time notifications and alerts that enable them to prioritise work, foster collaboration, and ensure deals keep moving forward. Salesforce CRM Analytics for Slack also now offers the Multi-Org Connect feature in its application, which gives teams the ability to view and share data insights in Slack across connected organisations.
11. Industry-Specific Enhancements
Here we look at the specific features Salesforce has introduced for your industry.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud: In this update, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud users (such as those in the banking, insurance, or mortgage and lending businesses) will be able to expedite customer interactions in the following ways:
- Business Relationship Plan: With Salesforce’s latest AI-powered updates, you can easily build business relationship plans, set goals, and measure success with tools and features designed specifically for commercial, small, and medium-sized banking.
- Einstein for Banking and Wealth Management Enhancements: Use Salesforce Einstein AI to easily boost productivity across sales and services teams and improve banking service with the help of complaint prompt templates and Action Launcher.
- Contextual Alerts: With the Winter’ 25 Release, wealth advisors can now receive notifications based on customer behaviours and signals within the Salesforce Data Cloud. This will help increase efficiency by delivering quick context from real-time data during customer conversations.
- Data Cloud for Insurance: Easily connect Salesforce Financial Services Cloud for Insurance to Salesforce Data Cloud by using prebuilt Data Model Objects (DMOs) for insurance policy and claims data.
- Einstein for Insurance Feature: The latest enhancements help you deploy Salesforce Generative AI tools faster with a single-screen widget to generate instant account and claims summaries.
Salesforce Health Cloud: With the Winter ’25 Release updates, healthcare, life sciences, and medical device manufacturing professionals will be able to enhance patient acquisition, foster loyalty, and facilitate cooperation throughout the complete care network in the following ways:
- Intelligent Appointment Management Enhancements: Salesforce Health Cloud CRM customers can now seamlessly book appointments with multiple providers or assets, like rooms or equipment, and ensure the availability of all resources with a single calendar view. You will also be able to schedule multiple patient appointments in the same time slot based on real-time availability.
- Einstein for Health Cloud: Improve the quality of patient care by equipping healthcare managers and admins with Salesforce Einstein AI tools. This will help generate summaries of appointments, discharge, benefits, and provider networks. The AI-powered CRM also lets you quickly generate outreach emails and update records with a single prompt.
- Provider Network Management Enhancements: Effortlessly build and maintain efficient healthcare provider networks by keeping critical provider information—such as rates and contracts—up to date and accurate. The new enhancement enables payers to easily manage large and complex roster files sent by network members.
- Home Health Enhancements: One of the new features offered by Salesforce’s Winter Release this year is a mobile app that helps you simplify home appointments by allowing patients to book, re-schedule, or even cancel appointments. The app also provides real-time visit details—including time elapsed and/or options to get additional support.
- Integrated Care Management Enhancements: With this feature, save partially completed forms to easily pick up where you left off in a clean list of in-progress assessments. You will also be able to update care plans automatically with every new health assessment.
- Participant Recruitment and Enrolment Enhancements: Salesforce Einstein for Life Sciences Cloud helps you auto-match candidates to relevant trials. You will get a comprehensive view of all the live research studies in your organisation and an exact count of patients in each stage of enrolment.
- Pharmacy Benefits Verification Enhancements: You can also now improve agent productivity with Salesforce AI-powered call scripts and benefits summary. The tool offers bulk re-verification flow for improved benefits interpretation, allowing agents to seamlessly create requests and update benefit coverage fields.
Other Industries:
- Retail and Consumer Goods: The new Winter ’25 Release enhancements for the retail sector include:
- Salesforce Einstein AI-driven account summaries that provide service agents with a comprehensive view of top-selling products, in-store compliance insights, transaction summaries, and customer responses.
- Targeted promotions that can be run on the Data Cloud according to each retail segment’s unique needs.
- Personalised Bluetooth keyboards that field teams can easily connect to the mobile app.
- Energy and Utilities: The new features for this sector include:
- Blending customer and asset data to generate quotes and time estimations from existing work order items.
- Automating monitoring, driving proactive service, and predicting maintenance needs by connecting Energy Consumption and the data from Energy Assets to the Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud app.
- Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud Service capabilities that are now deployed on the Salesforce Agentforce Action Platform to enable Gen AI on Service Apps (such as Contact Centre Console or Self-Service Portal). This eliminates the need to install a managed package to activate.
- Automotive: The enhancements for the automotive industry include:
- New pre-built templates for vehicle telematics event orchestration and out-of-the-box remote actions.
- Simplified loan origination processes for improved vehicle loan and lease experiences.
- Managing the entire vehicle service lifecycle within your Salesforce CRM with one view of active service entitlements or work orders and visibility into service-related outreach (like recalls or upgrades).
- Manufacturing: The manufacturing sector also stands to gain with the Winter ’25 Release by:
- Easily accessible quantity metrics with decimal flexibility, controlled quantity spread, and defined sales agreements with custom periods, designed to minimise revenue leakage and improve accuracy.
- Salesforce Einstein for Manufacturing Cloud simplifies deviation, revenue and margin impact analysis, and offers actionable recommendations for sales agreements.
- You can also unify asset and customer data for proactive service with real-time insights and AI predictions.
- Non-profit: Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud Intelligence for Fundraising allows quick strategy adjustments—such as creating new source codes, modifying channel strategies, and developing new content—to get the most out of your budget investments.
Are You Ready to Achieve More with Salesforce?
Salesforce’s Winter ‘25 Updates have been curated to help teams work smarter, provide better customer service, and leverage data and AI to stay competitive. Collectively, the Winter ’25 Release empowers businesses to automate more with Salesforce Agentforce and enhance data integration and synchronisation, while offering several hundred more industry-specific solutions to expedite processes and enhance scalability.
As Salesforce continues to innovate and improve its offerings with each release, you need the right Salesforce consulting partner to help you navigate these updates and ensure that they empower your team to achieve more.
As a trusted Salesforce Consulting Partner since 2018, Corptec Technology Partners has designed customer journeys for organisations across Australia by helping them maximise the potential of this leading CRM platform. We offer full-cycle implementation of Sales, Service, Marketing, and Financial Services Clouds, enable seamless adoption of Salesforce Einstein AI and Einstein Copilot, and support custom Salesforce integrations with any ERP or third-party applications.
To help ensure that Salesforce’s latest updates offer significant benefits for you, Corptec Technology Partners offers you a free discovery session to help unlock powerful cloud and AI features for your Salesforce CRM tools. Our AI Coach can help you:
- Assess your AI readiness
- Explore how Salesforce Agentforce and the new Salesforce Data Cloud enhancements would work for your specific business model
- Build an actionable roadmap to get you started with Salesforce Generative AI and Agentforce
Our discovery session is entirely free, with no commitment required. It’s an opportunity for you to explore the potential of Salesforce’s latest updates for your teams at no cost.
Eager to discover how you can leverage Salesforce Winter ’25 Release updates to boost your team’s productivity? Book a meeting with our expert today!
