Salesforce’s TrailblazerDX (TDX) 2022, a Salesforce developer conference at the end of April, featured a plethora of forward-looking statements, demos, workshops, and dancing mascots. Much was said and shown, but automation and collaboration were key themes at both TDX and the preceding analyst summit. So how does Salesforce's messaging line up with what software buyers are asking for?

Automation was an overarching theme

Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor spoke to a room full of analysts to kick off a summit preceding TDX at the end of April. Digital transformation was a major sticking point, especially in regard to automation. Taylor noted that digital transformation had been “accelerated by maybe a decade” as a result of the pandemic. However, according to him, B2B companies still need to catch up on automation and self-service.

Automation turned out to be the most prominent theme of the conference, with many of Salesforce’s forward-looking statements centering on the concept. Salesforce even played a short rap about automation before one of the keynotes, though I’m sure that’s in everybody’s listening rotation by now. Mulesoft's presentation on API design and API management focused heavily on automating as much of the process as possible, from API security policy configurations to documentation generation.

Low-code was one of the major methods on display for achieving development automation, along with robotic process automation (RPA). Bret Taylor spoke to what he sees as “accidental admins”: people stumbling into Salesforce development because it’s easy. During the “Build Fast with the Salesforce Platform” keynote, Autodesk’s Tzvetana Duffy spoke to the dichotomy between the importance of custom security standards in software development and the difficulty of building them. She emphasized that low-code development keeps security best practices automatic and under the hood, eliminating some of the risks that come with custom code by enforcing more on-rails development.    

Collaboration was another major focus

Beyond automation, the collaboration that low-code development might enable was another key theme that was brought up whenever low-code was mentioned. Bret Taylor said that he sees low-code as a way to “democratize” product and feature development by bringing less technical personas into the fold. Mulesoft touched on their vision of collaboration between Mulesoft Anypoint Platform users and Mulesoft Composer users. The idea is that technical developers will design APIs on Anypoint and then share those APIs to Composer, where admins can reuse them via a low-code interface.

These ideas are certainly nice to imagine, especially in a digital-first work environment. The promise of low-code as a way to bridge knowledge gaps between different teams concerned with product and feature development is enticing, as companies benefit from any strategy that accelerates their digital output.

But do low-code development platforms really democratize the development process? Or do they simply give non-technical developers more to do, while pro-code developers remain separate in their full stack development environments? Just how forward-looking is Salesforce’s focus on automation and collaboration?

How popular are automation and collaboration among G2 low-code reviewers?

Given Salesforce’s focus on automation and collaboration in the low-code space, I wanted to examine common themes that have popped up in reviews for products in G2’s Low-Code Development Platforms category.

The results were interesting. In the past year, 25% of reviews in G2's Low-Code Development Platforms category touched on automation when describing what they liked about a product. This suggests that buyers in the space are indeed looking for more and more automation as they navigate the current era of accelerated digital transformation.

However, a mere 1.6% of reviewers mentioned collaboration when discussing what they liked about a product. It seems that Salesforce’s vision of a low-code future involving proactive collaboration may still be a ways off. At least for now, collaboration doesn’t seem to be top-of-mind for reviewers in the low-code development space. Ease of use, automation, and features seem to be much more important to today’s users, who may indeed be using the software as individual contributors to their companies’ goals.

Looking forward

When a company as big as Salesforce shares its vision for the immediate future, it behooves B2B software buyers to pay attention to cues for their own software strategies. Still, expectations for user behavior when using  salesforce software can sometimes be overly optimistic. 

G2 data supports the idea that automation is rightfully a major concern for any company looking to enhance their digital transformation strategy with low-code tools. However, the dream of bringing no-code and pro-code users together in a single low-code environment may not match reality just yet.

I wager that low-code development platforms face an uphill battle trying to nurture buy-in from both non-technical developers and technical developers. Buyers should keep their expectations in check if they’re looking to purchase a low-code development platform with the goal of breaking down silos.