Salesforce Winter '27 (API 68.0) adds opportunity field configuration, scheduled prospecting runs, agent-assisted approvals, and automatic incident entitlement assignment. Einstein Activity Capture gets new exclusion controls. Gemini request rerouting starts October 20, 2026.
What's new in Salesforce Winter '27 automation
Pipeline Management Configuration Skill: choose fields for automatic updates
The Pipeline Management Configuration Skill accepts natural-language prompts to specify opportunity text fields for configuration. Reps can review suggestions in Pipeline Inspection; autonomous mode applies updates automatically.
Start with rep review. The suggestions are your evidence for deciding which fields to allow in autonomous mode. Document that field list before enabling automatic updates.
Approval Agent: summaries need a reviewer
Approval Agent lets reps submit and recall approval submissions and track pending approvals. Reviewers can retrieve submissions, generate AI-assisted summaries and comments, and approve or reject. Availability starts the week of September 14, 2026, where Advanced Approvals and Agentforce are enabled.
For a pilot, use an approval process with both prerequisites enabled. Test submission, recall, and pending-approval tracking from the rep side. Reviewers should check summaries against the original submissions before testing approval and rejection. A summary is not approval policy.
Agentforce Prospecting: schedule runs and widen research
Prospecting schedules let an agent run automatically by day, time, and frequency. Configure the schedule on **Assign Prospects** with **Distribute equally amongst sales reps**.
Engagement priority can boost contacts who engaged with your business in the past 12 months. On **Add Sources**, expand **Advanced Settings**, select **Boost Contacts with Past Engagement**, and choose the engagement level. Contacts without recent engagement are not excluded by this control.
Additional users for prospecting expands research to accounts owned by non-prospecting users. Resulting prospects go to prospecting users. Configure additional users under **Advanced Prospecting Settings** on **Assign Prospects**. The release data does not specify a per-owner routing map.
Have the prospecting business owner choose the run frequency and engagement level, and identify whose accounts belong in the research scope. Review the first scheduled run with the reps who receive its prospects. Did it research the intended accounts? How did past engagement affect priority? Record who received the prospects rather than assuming an owner-to-rep mapping.
VIP incident entitlements: test qualification before activation
The Assign Incident Entitlement Based on Privilege flow template automatically applies an entitlement to incidents reported by employees whose service management privilege is tagged VIP, giving those incidents faster SLA times. Person Accounts must be enabled. Assigners need the **Assign Service Management Privilege User** permission.
Before activating the flow:
- Confirm that Person Accounts is enabled.
- Review who can assign the VIP privilege.
- Set the intended Entitlement ID in the flow’s **Update Incident** element.
- Test incidents from employees with and without the VIP tag.
What to know before rollout
Partner calendars: test capture and booking together
Partner Portal calendar connections let partner users connect Google or Microsoft Office 365 calendars through Einstein Activity Capture. Customers can then book on partner calendars through Salesforce Scheduler with real-time availability checks. This requires the **PartnerEAC** add-on license, the **PartnerEACUser** permission set, and a **Partner EAC** configuration in Einstein Activity Capture.
Check **PartnerEAC** and **PartnerEACUser** assignments for your pilot users before creating the **Partner EAC** configuration. A connected calendar is only half the test: verify customer-facing Scheduler bookings before extending access.
Agentforce Engagement: keep the old name as a cross-reference
Agentforce Lead Nurturing is renamed Agentforce Engagement, available beginning August 24, 2026, with the **Agentforce Engagement** add-on. The old name may remain visible while the change propagates.
Update internal references, but keep Agentforce Lead Nurturing alongside the new name temporarily. Confirm the add-on before planning enablement.
What needs your attention
Einstein Activity Capture: review keyword and wildcard exclusions
Einstein Activity Capture exclusion controls now support keywords to exclude emails containing specific phrases and wildcard rules to exclude calendar events and emails from specific domains. The advanced sensitive content detection and exclusion setting has been removed.
Do not assume the new rules reproduce the removed setting’s behavior. Separate email-phrase requirements from domain exclusions, then map each requirement to a keyword or wildcard rule where appropriate.
Test representative emails and calendar events, including content that should remain captured. Requirements that do not map to either rule type need a policy decision from the business owner.
Gemini rerouting: prepare response acceptance tests
Gemini 2.5 request rerouting starts October 20, 2026. Requests for Gemini 2.5 Pro, Flash, and Flash-Lite will be rerouted to their Gemini 3.5 counterparts. Expected responses may change. The release notes recommend early testing but specify neither an advance-access date nor a testing route.
Inventory affected prompts and applications. Build representative test cases with acceptance criteria for both responses and application handling. Readable output alone is not enough.
Find out whether you have a route to test Gemini 3.5 before October 20. If you do, use it. Before rerouting starts, ask business owners to make an acceptance decision for the affected applications, with unresolved response differences and untested cases explicitly identified.
October 20 marks the start of rerouting, not a stated remediation deadline.