A concise guide to Winter ’26 highlights for Salesforce admins — AI agent upgrades, Flow improvements, security updates, and product-breaking release updates you must act on.
Overview
Winter ’26 delivers a broad set of features focused on AI (Agentforce), Flow and Orchestration improvements, user and security enhancements, and quality-of-life updates across Lightning and the Salesforce mobile app. This post summarizes the most impactful changes for admins and provides actionable steps to prepare your org.
Key Highlights
- Agentforce and AI: Employee Agents now close cases autonomously, new standard agent topics and actions, finer-grained conversation recommendation controls, agent migration flow, pre-deployment checks, session tracing, structured outputs for prompts, PDF and web retrievers, and testing with context variables.
- Flows & Automation: Generative AI decision elements, improved resource picker, nested loops (beta), Create Records now outputs the new record resource, Debug side-panel enhancements, persistent logging with FlowElementRun data, and structured outputs for custom agent actions.
- User & Security: Field history (beta) for User object, automatic removal of permission set licenses on unassign, async sharing recalculations, and several release updates requiring action (email verification enforcement; secure roles behavior; restrict user access to run flows).
- Reports, Dashboards & UI: Reference lines in dashboards, disable formulas in CSV exports (beta), multi-column sort on list views, and type-ahead when configuring list view fields.
Action Checklist for Admins
- Check the Maintenance Calendar for your instance’s Winter ’26 rollout dates.
- Test Agentforce features and new prompts in a sandbox or pre-release org.
- Review Release Updates in Setup and address action-required items (email verification, secure roles, and flow-run restrictions).
- Enable and test persistent logging and session tracing if you need detailed audit trails for flows and agents.
- Update agents that use deprecated verification actions to the new Service Customer Verification topic.
Use Cases & Benefits
These changes enable admins to automate mundane work (closing cases, responding to emails), build smarter automations (AI-driven decisions, structured outputs), and gain reliable observability (session tracing, persistent flow logs). They also increase platform safety (export sanitization, user field history, and updated sharing behaviors) which matters for compliance and scale.
Why This Matters
For admins, developers, and business users, Winter ’26 accelerates time-to-value by removing repetitive work and improving governance and debugging. Prioritize sandbox testing of AI agents, flow permissions, and any release updates that require manual action to avoid disruptions.
Next Steps
- Sign up for a pre-release org or use your Winter ’26 sandbox.
- Run the Agent Readiness Checklist and pre-deployment checks for agents.
- Update processes and permission sets to comply with the Restrict User Access to Run Flows update.
Categories: Salesforce Tips
Tags: Winter ’26, Agentforce, Flow, Release Updates