2025 Salesforce Ecosystem Predictions: How Did We Do? 

We like to prophesize here at Salesforce Ben, and any would-be fortune teller’s greatest threat is having to go back and revisit their predictions to see if they really knew what they were talking about.

At the start of the year, we made five bold predictions for the Salesforce ecosystem in 2025, and as the year comes to a close, it’s time to revisit those claims and see how many of them stood the test of time. So, here are our five predictions for 2025 – and the run-down on how true they turned out to be. 

1. Salesforce Will Go Big on M&A

We predicted that, because of Salesforce’s focus on profitability – and their historic wins through mergers and acquisitions like MuleSoft, Service Cloud, Tableau and Marketing Cloud – the CRM giant would return to its glory days and go on a shopping spree.

We hate to toot our own horn (we love it really), but this was pretty accurate. Salesforce has indeed gone on something of an M&A spree this year, making the following notable acquisitions:

Informatica stands out as the most notable of these, with the deal going through for a colossal $8B in equity value. The move is part of a plan by Salesforce to strengthen its data foundations and, therefore, bolster its AI capabilities. 

This year has been a year of M&A headlines for Salesforce, but it has also, crucially, been the Year of Agentforce… So let’s take a look at our next prediction. 

2. Agentforce Will Be a Slow Burner

We predicted that Agentforce would not be a silver bullet that would bring Salesforce back to the good old days of 25% growth or the favorable job market of 2022.

Implementation-light products like ChatGPT can enjoy rapid adoption, with very few barriers in the way of incorporating the OpenAI tool into everyday workflows – but the same cannot be said for Agentforce, which has a consumption-based pricing model to boot. 

While we were not exactly bullish on Agentforce in terms of the immediate future, we did predict that, as Salesforce was one of the first movers in its agent strategy, 2025 would “lay the groundwork for the years ahead”. 

It’s fair to chalk this one up as another win for our forecast. 

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff addressed the low adoption of Agentforce at Dreamforce ‘25 in October, telling the press: “It’s the fastest-growing product in our history. There’s never been a faster-growing product.”

He had been asked about the figures surrounding Agentforce, with 12,000 adoptions from 150,000 customers, equating to a rate of around 8%.

Earlier this year, in April, we reported that Salesforce’s Chief Financial Officer, Amy Weaver, said the company expected “modest” sales of Agentforce over the following year.

Agentforce is still evolving, and while adoption has hardly been astonishing, it continues to rise, and, just like we predicted, is laying the bedrock for future returns. 

In the company’s recent Q3 results, it was revealed that Agentforce and Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) had hit almost $1.4B in ARR, with Salesforce boasting of more than 9,500 paid Agentforce deals and 3.2 trillion tokens processed. 

3. Salesforce Growth Will Increase on All Fronts

In January, we wrote that the past few years have been tough for Salesforce, with growth declining from a consistent 25% over the past decades to just under 10% in more recent quarters. 

While this growth is certainly impressive for a company of Salesforce’s size, all of the CRM giant’s products – including Sales, Service, Slack, and Tableau – were affected by the stunted growth. MuleSoft painted a particularly stark case, seeing its quarterly growth drop from 26% to 1% over the course of seven quarters.

We predicted that Salesforce would see a resurgence in growth across the board as companies invested in their core tech. 

Here’s how the company did this year, taking a look at revenue in particular:

• In the FY25 Q4 results, revealed in February, Salesforce saw a revenue of $10BN – a year-over-year (Y/Y) increase of 8% and up 9% in constant currency (CC).
• FY26 Q1 revenue, revealed in May, was $9.8B, representing an increase of 8% both Y/Y and in CC.
• For Q2, in September, we saw revenue of $10.2B – up 10% Y/Y and 9% in CC.
• For Q3, Salesforce reported revenue of $10.3B, representing a 9% year-over-year (Y/Y) increase or 8% in CC.

Seems like we were on the money, in broad terms, but we used MuleSoft as an example before, so it’s only fair to use it again. In FY25 Q4, the figure for total revenue in CC saw 7% growth. In FY26 Q1, the figure was 8%, then rising in Q2 to 9%. In Q3, it was 6%. So, we were right about that too! 

4. The Job Market Will Remain Steady

We wrote that the majority of jobs in the technology sector have been at risk over the past few years, with hundreds of thousands of layoffs – and seemingly no particular niche of specialization is safe.

We refer to this as the Great Salesforce Job Market Reset. Writing in our predictions post in January this year, Salesforce Ben Founder Ben McCarthy said: “Whilst many will hope that 2025 will bring the glory days back to the technology world, I doubt it will happen. 

“It was only two years ago that companies started laying off huge chunks of their workforce, citing that they ‘hired too many people’ during the pandemic. I doubt the pain of this has worn off, and I doubt they will be making the same mistake twice.”

Ben added that businesses have become accustomed to operating in a leaner fashion, and the technology giants which laid off thousands of employees were still growing and becoming more profitable than ever.

AI and offshoring could also be factors in the Salesforce job market’s ability to see meaningful growth again, we predicted. 

According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 120,000 tech sector employees have been laid off in 2025 – as of time of writing, December 3, 2025. Compared to the 150,000 figure for 2024, and an astonishing 260,000 in 2023, it seems the impending threat of layoffs – while obviously not completely gone – has cooled down slightly in recent years, which is good news for us in the technology industry.

More specifically, this year we have seen the following moves in the tech sector: 

• In July, news was revealed that Microsoft would be laying off up to 9,000 workers in its second wave of mass layoffs this year.
• In August, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on a podcast that the company used AI agents to replace around 4,000 customer support division employees.
• In October, we reported on the news that Amazon planned to lay off 14,000 workers.

So, layoffs have been taking place, but not nearly to the same degree as we have seen in previous years. 

5. Salesforce Ecosystem M&A Activity 

In January, we wrote that the Salesforce ecosystem has always been an exciting place to be, with private equity firms, GSIs, and ISVs – along with Salesforce itself – all taking part in a healthy M&A economy. 

Companies have been focused inwardly over the past few years, but with the emergence of AI, we predicted that there would be a lot more M&A activity in the ecosystem. 

Aside from the eight acquisitions by Salesforce, referenced above, there have been a number of notable M&A deals within the Salesforce ecosystem.

In October, CPQ giant Conga agreed to acquire the B2B business of PROS from investment funds affiliated with Thoma Bravo. 

In August, it was revealed that Bullhorn, a recruitment software builder, would be acquiring Houston-based TargetRecruit, which offers front- and middle-office solutions on Salesforce platforms.

And in March, it was announced that Ascendx would be acquiring Salesforce data management platform CapStorm.

Salesforce rival ServiceNow also acquired AI-powered CPQ solution Logik.AI, to better compete with the cloud giant, and it also completed the $2.85B purchase of artificial intelligence firm Moveworks.

We’ve seen, as predicted, a healthy amount of M&A deals in the Salesforce ecosystem – not just from Salesforce itself. 

Final Thoughts

Broadly speaking, we appear to have been vindicated across many of our predictions – which were, taken as a whole, cautiously optimistic for Salesforce. 

With plenty of M&A activity, a steady job market, and Agentforce adoption being more of a marathon than a sprint, we appear to be seeing a return to stability in some ways for the mothership, which is perhaps somewhat ironic, given how revolutionary the latest innovations in AI are. 

What does 2026 hold for Salesforce? Share your opinion in the comments below – and look out for our next predictions post, coming soon! Hopefully, it proves to be as prophetic as our 2025 article.