Salesforce RIS squads ship app generating 28,000 opportunities

Salesforce frames the problem with a simple image: a race car stuck behind a tractor. Companies drop an agent into one step of a workflow, but everything before and after it still moves at human speed, so the value gets trapped at every review, handoff, or change request. That is why, in Salesforce's telling, 95% of companies aren't getting value from AI.

The company's answer is organizational rather than purely technical. In early 2026, its team asked what would happen if a product person, a business person, and engineers no longer had to hand work to one another in sequence, but instead built together in one small squad with the right guardrails. The RIS recipe follows from that: an opinionated stakeholder who owns the problem, a team as small as possible, and the problem shrunk to its smallest useful form. The daily loop — record the stand-up, post the transcript publicly, hand it to agents, repeat after lunch and overnight — is designed so agents keep building while people are away.

Alongside the Sales Signals app and the legal-routing tool, Salesforce cites a Slack Skill built by a three-person squad in less than four weeks that pre-fills timesheets for solution engineers, built 70%–80% faster than a traditional Agile process with 80% adoption and 23,000 weekly activities logged automatically. The company is now preparing to spread the model across every function in December, which will be the test of whether small squads can scale beyond early examples.