Summer may not have arrived in Australia just yet, but the Northern Hemisphere is already soaking up the sunshine, and the Salesforce ecosystem is blooming right along with it.
The Salesforce Summer ’26 release starts rolling out to production orgs from 15 June 2026, with exact timing varying by instance (check yours on Salesforce Trust). As always, the release notes run to hundreds of pages, so the SalesFix team has done the reading for you.
This release is less about one headline feature and more about a steady stream of practical improvements: AI woven into the tools you already use, smarter automation, better reporting, and tighter control over who sees what. Here are the ten changes we think will have the biggest impact for the widest range of our customers, whether you are a small for-purpose organisation or a large enterprise, and whatever you use Salesforce for.
KEY DATES FOR SUMMER '26
On-Brand Reports and Dashboards with Colour Palettes
Your dashboards can finally match your brand without manual fiddling. Define your organisation’s colour palette once in Setup (Themes and Branding), then select “Brand” in report chart properties or dashboard palette options, and your charts pick up your corporate colours automatically.
This is a small change with a big payoff: consistent, polished, on-brand visuals across every report and dashboard, which matters when those charts end up in board packs, funder reports, and executive presentations. It also improves accessibility by standardising colour use. Available in Lightning Experience for Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions.
Two Row-Level Formulas per Report
Until now, every report was limited to a single row-level formula, which usually meant compromising or creating extra formula fields on the object just to support reporting. Summer ’26 doubles the limit to two.
That means you can calculate, say, commission rate and days to close side by side in one report, without adding clutter to your data model. Fewer custom fields, faster answers, cleaner orgs. If your team leans on operational reporting day to day, this one quietly removes a long-standing annoyance.
Date Operators in Flow Decision Logic
Flow Builder gains a set of purpose-built date operators for Decision elements, including options like “Is Today”, “Is Tomorrow”, “Is On”, and anniversary-style comparisons. Previously, this kind of logic meant building fiddly formulas that were easy to get wrong and hard to maintain.
The use cases are everywhere: membership and contract renewal reminders, donor anniversary journeys, birthday communications, follow-ups due today. One thing to note: the new operators apply to Date fields, not Date/Time fields, so plan your data model accordingly.
Clickable Related Records in Screen Flow Data Tables
The Data Table component in Screen Flows now handles lookup fields properly. Tick a checkbox and the table displays the record’s name instead of a cryptic ID, with a hyperlink that takes the user straight to the record.
This sounds minor, but it makes Data Tables a genuine alternative to related lists in guided experiences. You can give users a clean, controlled view of related records (with edit and delete locked down) without resorting to URL formula workarounds. If you build Screen Flows for staff or portal users, this is one to adopt immediately.
Create Agentforce Agents Directly in Flow Builder
This is the most significant AI change in the release for automation builders. A new Create Agent element lets you drop an AI agent into a flow: either an existing Agentforce agent, or a “mini agent” with its own instructions and actions defined right on the Flow Builder canvas.
The practical upshot is that you can combine deterministic automation (the steps that must happen the same way every time) with AI reasoning (the steps that benefit from judgement, like summarising, classifying, or drafting) inside a single flow. For organisations exploring Agentforce, this dramatically lowers the barrier to putting an agent to work on a real process. Agentforce licensing is required.
Update Screen Flows with Natural Language Prompts
Agentforce can now modify Screen Flows from a plain-English instruction. Describe the change you want (“add a confirmation screen after the email step”) and Agentforce makes the adjustment on the canvas. This capability previously existed for record-triggered and schedule-triggered flows; Summer ’26 extends it to Screen Flows.
It is a real time-saver for quick changes, and a glimpse of where Salesforce administration is heading. Our advice: treat AI-generated changes like any other change. Review them properly, test them, and put them through your normal release process before activating. Speed is the benefit; governance is still your job.
Control Queue Access up to the Role Hierarchy
Until now, any record owned by or shared with a queue was automatically visible to everyone above the queue’s members in the role hierarchy. Summer ’26 introduces a Grant Access Using Hierarchies setting on each queue, so you can decide whether that upward sharing happens at all.
This matters for any organisation with sensitive queues (think HR cases, complaints, safeguarding matters) and for anyone tired of managers receiving notifications about records they never needed to see. Pay attention to the defaults: existing queues keep the current behaviour (enabled), but new queues default to disabled, and you can set an org-wide default in Sharing Settings. Worth a review as part of your next access audit so nobody is caught out.
Field Access: See Who Can See a Field, in One Place
A new Field Access option in Object Manager gives you a single, read-only summary of field-level security for any field, across profiles, permission sets, and permission set groups. No more clicking through a dozen Setup pages to answer “who can actually see this field?”
For organisations handling personal, financial, or health information, this is a genuinely useful governance tool: faster privacy reviews, faster audits, faster troubleshooting. It pairs nicely with another Summer ’26 change that surfaces permission dependencies for review before you save changes in the enhanced profile view.
Smarter Timing in Omni-Channel Routing
Two related improvements give service teams real control over when work gets handled, not just who handles it. First, Omni-Channel can now prioritise work based on the original request date, so an item that has been transferred between queues keeps its place in line instead of resetting to the back. Second, you can schedule work items to be routed at a specific future date and time rather than dropping them into the backlog immediately.
Both are configured in the Route Work action within Omni-Channel Flow. Together they make queues fairer for customers and workloads more predictable for teams, particularly in contact centres juggling transfers and follow-the-sun coverage.
Lightning Sync: Time to Move to Einstein Activity Capture
Our final pick is an action item rather than a shiny feature, and for affected customers it is the most important entry on this list. Lightning Sync is on the way out, and if you use it with Microsoft Office 365 via Exchange Web Services authentication, you must migrate to Einstein Activity Capture by August 2026 to avoid losing contact and calendar sync.
Salesforce provides a migration tool in Setup, and the path is structured: run the migration tool, assign Einstein Activity Capture permission set licences, add users to an active configuration, then switch off Lightning Sync. While you are reviewing your email integration footprint, note that Salesforce for Outlook is also being retired in December 2027. If either of these is part of your architecture, plan the move now rather than in the final weeks.
Honourable Mentions
A few more changes worth knowing about. Chatter is now turned off by default in new orgs (existing orgs are unaffected), while Salesforce channels in Slack become the default collaboration path for Enterprise and Unlimited editions, and approval processes can now run directly in Slack. Flow Approvals gain the option to require unanimous approval from a group in a single step. And for anyone running an Experience Cloud site, standard case assignment rules now apply automatically to cases created through your site, removing the need for custom routing logic.
What Should You Do Next?
Every release brings opportunity, and a little risk. Our suggestion: review the picks above against your own org, test anything that touches your critical processes in a sandbox before your instance is upgraded, and put the Lightning Sync migration on your roadmap now if it applies to you.
If you would like a hand working out which Summer ’26 features will deliver the most value for your organisation, talk to your SalesFix consultant. We love this stuff, and we are always happy to help you get more from every release.
Is your organisation taking full advantage of latest releases and optimising your Salesforce investment? Learn more about our Customer Success Program and how our team can help you get the most from Summer Release ’26.