Salesforce Connections 2026 Recap

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The backdrop of Salesforce Connections

I remember my first Salesforce connections. When I didn’t know anybody and I didn’t know anything about the Salesforce ecosystem and I was just walking around wandering like a lonely adventure in another country.

That was back in 2018 when I was working as a Marketing Cloud administrator and starting to get my hands on every feature of Marketing Cloud that I could... Including MobileStudio, MobilePush and everything in Email Studio.

Fast-forward to the next connections I went to which was in 2023 and was on stage with Sarah Franklin, the president and CMO of Salesforce at the time. That Salesforce connections was incredibly special. Salesforce gave me the Golden Hoodie while my mom and sister sat front row at the Marketing Keynote.

Here's the video that Salesforce played at the 2023 Marketing Keynote.

This year in 2026, I came as somebody who has nearly a decade of experience in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce ecosystem and I have an entirely new perspective about everything I see and every person I meet.

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How we got here & why I write these letters to you

Since 2017, when I first started learning Salesforce, I’ve had the habit of writing about my experiences each day, week, or even month.

Writing has taught me what I’m learning in Salesforce from a technical perspective.

I'm also learning more about myself along the way. That's really why I write these letters and send them out into the world. I just want to give back and share with someone who's willing to learn and get better and improve their life.

When I first started off in May 2017 as a Salesforce admin, I was just learning like anybody who was brand new to the Salesforce ecosystem.

I barely knew what Salesforce was and I didn’t understand how it actually fit into a Company. As time went on, I started writing about everything.

Writing helped my career

I decided to write what I was learning on LinkedIn, which ended up getting me introduced to a recruiter at Love’s travel stops, upon which he reached out and asked me if I wanted to come in for an interview. I said yes, and after a few rounds of interviews, I ended up getting the job at Love’s travel stops, where I worked for about two years.

When I first started at Love’s, I was a Salesforce administrator handling service tickets inside of service cloud. About two weeks into the job, my Manager asked if I wanted to learn Marketing Cloud.

I jumped on the opportunity and shortly after that, she sent me to Los Angeles for a Marketing Cloud five day training put on by Salesforce Academy..

I was brand new to Marketing Cloud, and only had viewer access and yet at the time I was the only person internally who knew how to really even log into Marketing Cloud.

We had an external contractor and I got pretty close with him after asking him a whole bunch of questions and reaching out to the guy who was our Marketing Cloud admin on the internal team before he left and got a consulting job.

I took the former internal Marketing Cloud expert out to Starbucks and asked him to teach me the basics of Marketing Cloud, and he was kind enough to do that, even though he didn’t work for the company anymore.

The only person doing Marketing Cloud

Being the only person who does Marketing Cloud after your boss asks you to learn it makes you feel a little lonely. You'll reach out to someone for help eventually. And I'm glad that Rob was able to help in those early days to get me started on the right foot.

Fast-forward a bit, and Love's hired Natasha as the Marketing Cloud Product Owner, who took me under her wings. I started to learn Marketing Cloud and every time I would learn something new, I documented what I learned and tried to write down everything I was experiencing in real time.

The birth of Marketing Cloud videos

I made videos so I could teach my family how to do Marketing Cloud, and to make a long story short... Time went on and people saw the videos & asked questions because they also struggled with Marketing Cloud.

I noticed that I wasn't the only one who needed help in Marketing Cloud. I moved on from Love’s and got a job as a Marketing Cloud engineer at a consulting company where I worked for about a year until Covid happened and everyone lost their jobs.

Right at the beginning of Covid, I had no job. But I did know what I wanted to do, which was teach Marketing Cloud.

At this point during covid in 2020, I had three years of Salesforce Marketing Cloud experience and wanted to make a course that the 2017 version of me would’ve wanted when I first started out in Marketing Cloud.

So I created a Salesforce Marketing Cloud beginners guide course, where I basically walk-through every single area of Marketing Cloud and explain what it is and why it works.

It’s one of the very first courses I ever created in Marketing Cloud, and the reason why I did it was because I knew that somebody was struggling to learn Marketing Cloud at their Company, and I wanted to help them out as best as I knew how to.

The Summer of Covid, I studied for that Salesforce Marketing cloud class presented by Salesforce Academy, and ended up becoming a Salesforce Academy certified Instructor.

I taught the official Salesforce Trailhead classes on behalf of Salesforce.

I ended up working at RevolentGroup as a Salesforce Instructor, and did that from July 2020 until January 2024, where I went on my own as a Marketing Cloud consultant independently.

Independent Consulting

Since 2024 I’ve been doing independent Salesforce Marketing Cloud consulting as an

• Solution architect

• Business, analyst

• Developer

• Project Manager

I’ve learned so much about Marketing Cloud from a coding and data management perspective.

So heading into Salesforce connections where everything was about data and AI agents, the conversations were a lot more relevant to me.

Because I’ve worked with data and Marketing Cloud so closely, all of the conversations around large language models, and AI agents and the data360 layer made sense to me.

I was able to go to product demos and booths in the Campground area and talk about concepts that were once foreign to me.

The level of depth I was able to have conversations about were much deeper than when I went to Salesforce connections back in 2018 and 2023.

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Mulesoft Agents = My biggest take away from connections

I had a conversation with the Mule soft team, and after seeing their demo about agents and orchestrating agent workflows from visual studio code, I started to really see what the future of work looks like.

I highly recommend to the person who wants to see what agent workflows and agent orchestration looks like...

Play around with Claude skills, and the Mulesoft platform.

I’m still pretty new to the entire agent orchestration conversation, but the main take away I got from it was that

You can replace entire Work flows in your personal & business life because you can explain your processes in a step-by-step way and build a solution to automate repetitive steps that you do every day, week, month and year.

Here's what you do (in 3 steps):

1. Write every step in a process.

2. Create the order that those steps are supposed to take place

3. Write the things that trigger each step to start.

How the agent works:

• Agents are designed to complete a specific step in your process, like a real person...

• The agent knows when to complete that step, because it has an agent orchestrator, or an agent broker that’s telling it when to go to work.

It honestly sounds like science fiction. Where we have these robots in the cloud doing a bulk of our repetitive work and allowing us to have more time to focus on creative strategic work. 

The main take away I got was this:

For the people who know how to build these agents, you are going to be in extremely high demand for a very long time. And for the businesses that are using these tools, you are going to run laps around your past performance, and other people who aren’t applying this automation into their business and life.

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The community vibe

The creative team at Salesforce put together an amazing experience, which included LEGO sets where you could compete in a Lego competition.

They had the best Boba tea I’ve ever had. They had areas where you could listen to conversations about Salesforce, and catch up with people in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud community.

You get to see faces that you usually only see on LinkedIn through a profile picture.

I was able to meet up with Mounir, Ed, Najee, Guilda, Larry, Annie, Anthony, Natasha, and so many more.

Catching up with everybody was such a big highlight

Understand conversations about coding and AI agents gave me a lot of confidence while I was there.

What the AI conversations showed me

As you keep learning, your confidence will grow. That confidence will encourage you to dive deeper into the community because you’re putting your time, energy, and effort into perfecting your craft. You're becoming an expert at what you do, day after day, challenge after challenge.

What the Salesforce community is all about

To me, the Salesforce community is so much bigger than just YouTube videos, blogs, and Slack channels.

The Marketing Cloud community is a tight knit community that cares about success, wants other people to succeed, and is there to help others on their journey in the tech part of Marketing Cloud and the career side of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

You can literally be anybody you wanna be and do anything you wanna do. The strong community in Salesforce is what allows for that to happen because none of us work in a silo and none of us work alone and have it all figured out.

We all need each other and we’re all learning. Why people are able to keep learning at such a fast pace is because there are people in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud community that want to give back. And that’s what Salesforce connections is all about.

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Capping things off

Salesforce connections, 2026 is a lot more than product demos and Keynote speeches. It’s full of information about the future and the people who are building the future.

No matter what you’re working on in the Salesforce system,

It’s always good to look up from your work and take in everything you’ve learned. Have conversations about where you’re headed in the future so you can equip yourself with the knowledge, ideas, skills, and experience to earn a competitive salary and live the life you want to live today, and in the future, no matter how uncertain the future may seem.

How I can help you

If Marketing Cloud is something you want to get better at, and want career guidance about, then send me a DM and I can point you in the right direction to help you get to where you wanna go.

Kaelan Moss,

MinuteAdmin

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PS – one more highlight I forgot to mention.

The Salesforce, Chicago Tower

The Salesforce Chicago tower was smack dab in the middle of downtown Chicago, looking at multiple angles of the river, and was one of the cleanest buildings both outside and inside that I’ve ever seen.

It had one of the coolest office concepts hat I’ve ever walked into.

It reminded me of what I think Apple or Google look like. And here I was... right in the middle of it. Getting a tour.

I took videos and made a full video out of the experience. If you’re interested in looking at it, here’s the link to the original post on LinkedIn. or you can click below. Enjoy.

P.P.S. I’m serious, if you have any questions about what to do in your Salesforce Marketing Cloud career and which step you should take, reach out and ask, and I can point you in the right direction. Just hit me up on LinkedIn and fire away with your question.