Salesforce Winter '27 for Agentforce and Data 360 builders: what changes and what breaks

If your org is on a first-wave instance, you have been running Winter ‘27 since September 4. Everyone else upgrades on October 2 or October 9. Dreamforce sits between those two weekends.

The release notes went live on August 19. I wanted something narrower: the changes that matter if you build agents on Agentforce, run pipelines in Data 360, or maintain the Apex and integrations underneath both.

The dates, and the one you have to look up yourself

The public schedule ran like this: pre-release orgs opened on August 13, release notes on August 19, and the sandbox preview on August 28. Production instances upgrade across three weekends: September 4, October 2, and October 9. Salesforce’s newsroom calls the release generally available on October 12, 2026, the Monday after the last one. Dreamforce runs September 15 to 17.

None of those pages has your date. Your production weekend depends on your instance, and the only place that lists it is the maintenance calendar on Salesforce Trust. The official releases page sends you there rather than printing dates. Log into My Trust Center and it shows just your orgs.

Do that before you plan anything else. Until you have looked, “we have until October” is a guess.

One trap catches teams every cycle. A sandbox only landed on a preview instance if it was created or refreshed before August 27 at 5 p.m. Pacific. Refresh it after that and it stays on Summer ‘26 until its own instance upgrades, so a team that “tested in the sandbox” in early September may have tested nothing.

The release a sandbox is on shows in Setup under Company Information. Which sandboxes you keep on preview is a sandbox strategy decision worth writing down once.

Agentforce: the ambient agent, the contact centre, and delegation outside Salesforce

Salesforce’s own announcement leads with Service. Adaptive Experiences and Dynamic Plans ship as a capability of the Service Rep Assistant. An agent watches a live case and rewrites the resolution plan as the conversation changes, without the rep prompting it again.

I wrote up what a dynamic plan is, and the short answer is rep-assist, not autonomy. The plan rewrites itself. The human still executes it. Model the credit and latency cost of a plan that keeps re-planning before you switch it on for a queue.

Agentforce Contact Center is now available in over 30 countries, which reopens the native-CCaaS question for multinationals. The call on going native still comes down to routing, recording, and the cost of moving the channel stack you already own.

Third-Party Orchestration extends Agentforce across any A2A-compliant ecosystem, and the announcement names agents on AWS, Azure and Google as delegation targets. That moves the Agent2Agent protocol from supported to headline, and it changes the multi-agent orchestration question. The agent you delegate to is now one you cannot open in Builder.

For builders, the consequential items are under the hood. Agent Skills and Plugins arrive with over 100 prebuilt skills, alongside a Salesforce Development plugin for Claude Code that grounds itself through hosted MCP servers. If you have been following the Agent Skills format, this is that work becoming a supported product.

Hosted MCP Servers cut the other way too. Salesforce can now host MCP servers that external AI clients connect to through governed, authenticated connections, while the API Catalog registers external servers for your agents to use.

My earlier piece on connecting Agentforce to an MCP server covered the client side. Winter ‘27 makes the org a server as well, which is the part your security team will want to review before anyone turns it on.

On observability, Custom Scorers, in beta, let a team define its own pass or fail evaluation for an agent session. That is the instrument the regression testing further down needs.

Agentforce Sales: the rename is the small part

Salesforce’s product page for what used to be Sales Cloud is now titled Agentforce Sales, and the Winter ‘27 notes use that vocabulary throughout. The same umbrella naming has reached revenue management.

The item with migration consequences: Agentforce Engagement agents are now built in the new Agentforce Builder, which runs on Agent Script.

I covered what the new Builder is when the legacy builder stopped creating agents in July, and why Agent Script’s deterministic control matters for a nurture agent that must never contact the wrong segment. If you built nurture logic on the older configuration, plan the move rather than waiting to be moved.

The rest of the Sales list is incremental and useful. Agentforce Prospecting can be scheduled to run on the days and times that suit the team, which addresses the overnight-research problem from my sales agents piece.

Forecasting has been renamed Pipeline Forecasting and now shows deal risks, methodology scores, contact insights, agent activity and activity heatmaps in the forecast view, the data the pipeline forecast agent used to assemble by hand. Einstein Conversation Insights generates suggested next steps once a meeting transcript is available, and voice notes capture details from conversations that were never transcribed.

Data 360: a monthly stream, and October is the month to read

Data 360 does not really have a Winter ‘27 release. Its features ship as often as monthly, and the Winter ‘27 items are the ones the Data 360 release notes file under October 2026, next to what already landed in August and September.

Four items stand out for anyone running ingestion at volume.

Problem Records get their own data lake objects, a structured place to find rows that ingestion quarantined instead of failing. I wrote up why records vanish on ingestion and how to get them back when the feature surfaced.

Developers get a first-class way to run Data 360 SQL from Apex, replacing the hand-rolled ConnectApi loops in querying Data 360 from Apex.

Moving governance metadata from sandbox to production gets easier, extending the deployment story that Data Kits started.

Data Detect in Shield can now scan data lake objects, so the sensitive-text discovery that stopped at CRM fields reaches the ingested data an agent is most likely to ground on.

On the warehouse side, a Snowflake Zero-Copy V2 connector for data shares extends the zero-copy pattern. The announcement also pairs Data 360 with Tableau Knowledge, which generates knowledge graphs from structured and unstructured data. Early, but it points the same way as agentic analytics.

The Apex and API changes developers feel first

The developer change everyone will quote is heap. Synchronous Apex goes from 6 MB to 10 MB and asynchronous from 12 MB to 25 MB, applied on your upgrade date with nothing to enable. If you want to compare behaviour first, a setting labelled “Enforce the Summer ‘26 Apex heap limit” keeps the old ceiling, and Limits.getLimitHeapSize() tells you which one a transaction is under.

Temper the excitement. Heap is the governor limit production code hits least. CPU time and SOQL rows fail far more often, so this helps one class of large-payload transform. It is not a reason to stop slicing work across Queueables the way Apex Cursors encourage. The slice got wider.

REST API URIs can now use latest instead of a version number. Convenient in tooling and scripts, and dangerous in a production integration, which would then change API version every upgrade weekend without anyone deciding to. Pin versions in anything that processes money.

The beta FORMULA() function in SOQL lets a WHERE clause compare two fields on the same record, which used to need a formula field or a filter after the query. It requires API version 68.0 and is available in sandboxes, Developer Editions, and scratch orgs only, so design around it later rather than shipping it now.

For teams that test agents and integrations in CI, Apex integration tests reach developer preview. Classes annotated @IntegrationTest can make real HTTP callouts, with @BeforeClass and @TearDown for setup and cleanup, at the cost of automatic rollback. They run asynchronously, one at a time, behind a scratch-org flag.

Narrow, but it is the first time the platform’s own runner may touch a real endpoint, which matters for agent testing pipelines that mock everything today.

Also new: an Apex Symbol API in beta, and an explicitNamespace option on Database.QueryOptions that fixes field-name collisions in managed packages. ISVs who ship on AppExchange have wanted that one for years.

The release updates and retirements that will break something

Winter ‘27 is where several long-running deprecations arrive with dates, and the pattern in every one is the same. Nothing fails on the upgrade weekend. Something fails months later when enforcement lands and nobody connects the two.

SOAP login() now requires the Use Any API Auth permission. Users without it can no longer authenticate through the SOAP login call, and a great many integration users got their access through a profile that predates the permission.

Check every integration user, including the ones nobody remembers creating. In the same wave, SOAP login() on API versions 31.0 through 64.0 retires in Summer ‘27. A second Platform API retirement covers versions 21.0 through 30.0 across Bulk, SOAP and REST, next to the announced 31.0 to 40.0 wave.

Apex on API versions 9.0 through 19.0 now warns at compile time, in Setup, the CLI and the VS Code extensions, ahead of retirement. Move those classes and triggers to 20.0 or later. Old orgs have more of these than anyone expects, clustered in code nobody has opened since its author left, the same archaeology as any other technical debt.

Profile Filtering is enforced. Users see only their own profile name unless they hold View All Profiles. The Salesforce Ben admin write-up treats it as a no-action item, and for most orgs it is.

But any flow, validation rule, Apex query or managed package that reads another user’s profile name now gets nothing back, and it will not fail in testing because administrators see everything. Test it as a standard user.

Setup Audit Trail also gets its own permission, so auditors no longer need View Setup to read it. Grant the new permission, then remove the broad one.

The OAuth username-password flow retirement is listed under Winter ‘27 but enforced later. Practitioner write-ups say enforcement has been pushed into early 2027 and that there is no deprecation banner in the UI. To find callers, filter Login History to the Remote Access 2.0 application type. Move them to the client credentials or JWT bearer flow behind Named Credentials.

The instanced-URL update, for API traffic that still targets an old instance hostname instead of the My Domain login URL, sits in the same listed-now-enforced-later category. So does the Summer ‘27 block on managed packages running anonymous Apex through a session ID, which ISVs should design out now.

One rule resolves every date question above. The Release Updates node in your own Setup is the source of truth. Summaries, this one included, tell you what exists. Only your org tells you the date you will be held to.

What to test in the preview window, in the order it will hurt

Preview sandboxes are the only place to see Winter ‘27 before your instance moves, and the window closes on your production date. My order, from most likely to break silently to least:

Inventory integration users and API versions. List every caller that authenticates through SOAP login() or the password flow, pull the API versions in use per integration user, and confirm each holds Use Any API Auth. A security health check should already have surfaced this. Winter ‘27 turns it from hygiene into a deadline.
Grep metadata for Apex at API version 19.0 or below, and for any code that reads a profile name for a user other than the running one. Fix both in the same sprint.
Run the profile-filtering scenarios as a real standard user, not as an administrator with a debug log open.
Regression-test every deployed agent in the preview sandbox with the Agentforce Testing Center, and re-run your Custom Scorers if you use them. Engagement agents and anything built on the legacy builder deserve a full pass.
Re-run your Data 360 pipelines after the October drop and check the new Problem Records objects. The monthly cadence means the sandbox you validated in September may not have had them.
Try Flow Test Mode, in beta, on critical flows, and re-test them as a standard user. Flow now enforces user-context permissions more explicitly.
Ask every managed package vendor whether they have tested on Winter ‘27 and whether their package reads profile names.

If you want one view of how much of this exposure your org carries, the org health scorecard surfaces old API versions, stale integration users and untested automation as a single list.

Understanding the basics

When is the Salesforce Winter ‘27 release?

Production orgs upgrade on one of three weekends, September 4, October 2, or October 9, 2026, depending on their instance, and Salesforce describes the release as generally available on October 12. Release notes were published on August 19, and preview sandboxes upgraded from August 28.

How do you find your org’s Winter ‘27 upgrade date?

Open the maintenance calendar on the Salesforce Trust site, or log into My Trust Center with your Salesforce credentials to see maintenance events for your own instances. The releases page on salesforce.com does not print dates. A sandbox’s current release is visible in Setup under Company Information.

What is Salesforce API version 68.0?

API version 68.0 is the version introduced with Winter ‘27. New features gated on it include the beta FORMULA() function in SOQL, and it is what the latest alias resolves to once your org has upgraded.

If you only do one thing

Make it the integration-user inventory. Every other item in this release fails loudly and early. That one fails in February, on a Saturday, in an integration nobody has touched since the person who built it left.

Read the rest of the notes when you can. Read the Release Updates node in your own Setup today.

Winter ‘27 lands on a date you did not pick. If you want a second pair of eyes on your integration users, API versions and agent regression plan before that weekend, talk to us, or run the org health scorecard first and bring the results.