The world of DevOps has been growing for some years within the tech sector, and cloud giant Salesforce is no exception. It only makes sense to want to ensure admins and developers can work through the software development lifecycle with maximum efficiency, so the philosophy of DevOps – which seeks to make this process quick and painless – has been a natural fit for the ecosystem.
As the trend continues in the world of Salesforce, we spoke to Copado to find out what they are predicting for the DevOps space in 2025.
Climbing Technical Debt Mountain
Copado SVP David Brooks says that the adoption of DevSecOps best practices (bringing security into the DevOps mix) will take off in 2025, driven by the adoption of GenAI for code and test generation.
“Companies will insist that measures are in place before widely adopting AI,” he said, adding that Low Code teams will “finally get serious” about adopting functional testing best practices.
David says this will take place as teams come to realize that low code combined with GenAI can produce sophisticated applications that rival pure code solutions.
Additionally, as GenAI increases the velocity of Code Development, companies will start tackling more complex projects that were impractical in the past, David says.
This will include addressing mountains of technical debt and spending more time on user experience improvements that require significant coding to realize.
Another prediction he made was that Agile would be “saved” by GenAI.
“Many teams have found it difficult to adopt Agile methodologies,” David said. “GenAI will make it easier to adopt Agile best practices and finally realize the benefits of Agile.”
An Edge for Integration
Founder and CTO of Copado, Federico Larsen, predicts that AI solutions that can seamlessly integrate into users’ existing work environments and tools will gain a significant competitive edge over standalone platforms.
We saw some of this philosophy reflected at Dreamforce ’24, which demonstrated how Agentforce can be integrated into Slack and the Salesforce CRM interface.
Federico added that purpose-built AI solutions tailored for specific industries or use cases will likely demonstrate superior efficiency compared to general-purpose AI platforms.
A Return to AI Realism
Esko Hannula, Senior Vice President, Product Management at Copado, thinks we will see a return to AI realism after two years of “hype”.
“On one hand, we’ll continue seeing rapid progress and breakthrough innovations, some of which may still be unimagined today,” he told Salesforce Ben.
“On the other hand, we will also see disappointment with inflated initial expectations: AI did not replace human work as fast as many had thought, it turned out to be less reliable than we hoped for, and very few of those startups that built a nice wrapper around OpenAI will be worth billions.
“Such disillusionment is a healthy and necessary stage in the evolution of generative AI.”
Esko said that AI copilots have proven beneficial in software development, and there are promising results in fully automatic code generation too, “although it’s not yet living up to expectations,” he said.
He added: “We envision the roles of the developer and the copilot swapping in the future: AI-powered development tools will be capable of transforming requirements, user stories, design diagrams, or wire models into working code with the assistance of a developer. This mode of working calls for a different type of development tools, where AI makes the developer aware of context.”
People have learned to appreciate conversational user interfaces, which seem to be well suited for defining complex, non-repetitive user actions or iterative interactions between the user and the application, Esko says.
“Today’s state of the art is an embedded ‘chat box’ in their user interface for ‘asking AI’. Tomorrow, we’ll see people interacting with applications conversationally outside of the application itself; in Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, or even Snapchat,” he said.
“Or imagine how handy it would be for an SAP user to ask AI to fetch updated customer contact information from Salesforce! In other words, the borderlines of applications are changing, and sometimes the user interacting with an AI Agent may be another AI agent rather than a human being.”
Final Thoughts
Like much of the Salesforce ecosystem – and the tech sector as a whole – the world of DevOps is abuzz with how exactly AI will revolutionize the industry.
While DevOps and AI are still somewhat burgeoning fields, it would appear they are both in alignment with the idea of maximizing efficiency wherever possible. As 2025 shapes out in reality, it will likely see both sectors deployed toward this goal – possibly hand-in-hand.
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