2019 Automation and Decisioning Year-In-Review and Beyond
2019 was a tremendous year for Lightning Flow and Einstein Next Best Action. We launched a brand new builder (the new Flow Builder) and a brand new decisioning platform (Next Best Action) at the beginning of the year, and we subsequently made flows easier (think flow templates) and more powerful (Hello, scheduled flows) at the same time. The importance of Flow was also recognized in the new model of the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform:
As a product marketer, I was really fortunate to join one of the most exciting product teams at Salesforce back in February, and it has been an amazing year 1.
I would love to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve accomplished in 2019 and share some exciting new features that we have planned for 2020.
Top 2019 Automation Advancements
Here are some of the top features we shipped in 2019:
New Flow Builder (Spring’19 — February 2019) — You’ve asked for an easier to use, fast-loading automation builder and we’ve delivered with the new Flow Builder. With streamlined screen and logic configuration, we’ve completely revamped the builder experience on top of our Lightning Web Component framework to make it even easier to build powerful screen flows.
Next Best Action (Spring ’19 — February 2019) — We also created a powerful addition to our product suite by introducing Next Best Action, which helps to integrate and unify your organization’s sources of insight to drive optimal recommendations that are delivered at the right place and right time. Next Best Action and Flow are an amazing combination: Flow gets things done and Next Best Action helps ensure that it’s the right things that get done.
Flow Templates (Spring’19 — February 2019) — We enabled our partners and customers to create flow templates, which are pre-built business processes that you can clone and customize. The community has embraced these templates, so now you can jumpstart process automation without building from scratch while learning from industry best practices. Go to the AppExchange to check out a growing collection of templates available to download today!
Automation Home Beta (Summer’19 — June 2019) — We created a new home for analytics on automation activities in your org. You can view the most commonly used automation types, see your org’s flow activity in charts, such as total errors and total started automations, learn how much time it’s taking users to complete screen flows, and finally optimize as needed.
Rich Data Type Support (Summer’19 — June 2019) — With the new Apex-defined resources in flows, a flow no longer needs to use Apex code to process complex data objects that are typically returned from calls to web services. You can now create Apex-defined variables in flows and declaratively work with rich web data for the first time.
Scheduled Flows (Winter’20 — October 2019) — Schedule flows and run batch jobs without code with Lighting Flow Scheduler, with the same massive scale that Apex batch jobs support. You can now schedule an autolaunched flow run once or on a schedule whether to mass update some records or create tasks to check in with customers a month before their contracts expire. And what’s more, you can also specify a query to pull a batch of records to run the scheduled flow against, giving you powerful new batch processing capabilities.
Lightning Web Component Support (Winter’20 — October 2019) — Another Winter 20 release, you can now leverage the web standards and performance benefits of Lightning Web Components inside flow screens. You can integrate components that your developers have built or find them on AppExchange for use in your flow screens.
Strong Momentum
With all these killer features, the Flow team has seen strong adoption growth both from our customers and within Salesforce. Across our thousands of customers, we now see over 250 billion process executions per month, a 500% growth in the past 18 months. In true Salesforce on Salesforce fashion, even internal Salesforce product teams are adopting Flow as part of their automation roadmap. Many customer-favorite Salesforce features are actually built on top of the same flow engine behind the Flow Builder. Here are a few that you may have come across:
- Salesforce Order Management in Commerce Cloud is now GA in Winter ‘20
- High-Velocity Sales in Sales Cloud sees + 19,100% growth in cadence executions since launching in Spring ‘19
- Field Service Lightning in Service Cloud sees + 1,026% growth in flow executions in 2019
And the strongest validation for our massive momentum in 2019 came at our biggest event of the year, Dreamforce 2019. We saw over 39 breakout and theater sessions dedicated to Flow just from those we tracked internally. For many of them, we had to turn customers away due to overcapacity. Fortunately, we collected all the available slides and videos here so you can easily access them. I can’t wait for our next flagship event, TDX 2020!
What’s next?
Based on our strong momentum, it’s clear that there’s a huge demand for building powerful automated processes in low-code enterprise apps. We want to continue to enhance our dynamic flow screens, a true differentiation between the Salesforce automation suite compared to other solutions out there. In 2020, we will invest in these themes:
- Simplification — we want everyone to build flows 2x faster with half the clicks. We want to make Flow Builder the best tool for all your automation needs by bringing behind the scenes automation capabilities currently available in Process Builder to Flow Builder.
- Enterprise-ready — We also want to make Flow more robust for enterprises with better process lifecycle management that includes enhanced debugging and process analytics.
- Ecosystem — We will further expand our growing ecosystem by providing powerful invocable action support and configurable UI for flow developers and ISVs.
To kickoff 2020, here is a preview of some of the features coming in the Spring’ 20 release:
Trigger on record changes 10x faster!! — Our first step to bring Process Builder features to Flow Builder is to make it possible to trigger a flow when records are created or updated with Before-Save Updates. Before-Save Updates in flows are 10x faster than Process Builder and avoid recursion issues by doing the updates before the save is done in the database.
Configurable invocable actions (pilot) — We are making it possible for developers to create rich experiences for admins using Lightning Web Components. Previously, developers could not control the user interface that Flow Builder admins used to configure their actions in Flow Builder. With generic Object support now GA, developers can build highly customized screen components with any input collection of records.
If you haven’t started using Flow or have not tried out some of our newer features, make it your new year resolution to learn Flow today or check out of a preview of all the new Spring’20 features in the release notes here.
