Maintain Your Business Analyst Certification for Summer '26

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the difference between traditional automation and agentic automation in Salesforce.
Describe how orchestration density helps you select the correct automation approach for a business process.
Identify when to use Agentforce instead of Flow or Apex for a given use case.
Explain how reasoning traces help validate agent behavior during user acceptance testing.
Identify the data readiness conditions a Business Analyst validates before an Agentforce implementation goes to user acceptance testing.
Explain how brand color palettes support consistent reporting across an organization.
Identify upcoming Salesforce security requirements and their effective dates.

Stay Current with Your Certification

Salesforce certifications hold the most value when you keep them relevant. To keep your Business Analyst certification current, complete this badge by the due date.

Interested in learning more about getting certified? Check out the Business Analyst certification.

While anyone can earn this badge, it is designed for those who hold the Business Analyst certification.

As part of the Salesforce Certification Program, you agree to the terms of the Salesforce Certification Program Agreement. Review the exam policies in the agreement and the Salesforce Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct article before you continue.

Business Analyst Certification Overview

As a Salesforce-certified Business Analyst, you connect business needs with technical solutions. You gather requirements, align stakeholders, and help your team build Salesforce solutions that improve business outcomes.

Certified Business Analysts deliver value when they:

Translate business goals into clear, actionable requirements.
Facilitate collaboration between stakeholders and development teams.
Evaluate solutions to ensure they meet business needs.
Support continuous improvement of Salesforce implementations.

In this badge, we highlight key updates you need to know for Summer ’26 to keep your certification current and your skills sharp.

Select the Correct Automation Approach

Salesforce offers two main approaches to automation. As a Business Analyst, understanding the difference helps you guide your team toward the correct tool for each business process.

Compare Traditional and Agentic Automation

Traditional automation, built with Flow and Apex, follows a fixed path defined before the process runs. Every step and outcome is known in advance. This makes it a strong fit for rule-based tasks that require predictable results, high-volume record processing, or strict auditability.

Agentic automation, powered by Agentforce, works differently. Rather than following a fixed path, the Atlas Reasoning Engine evaluates context at runtime and determines the next best action. This makes Agentforce well suited for processes where the goal is clear but the steps cannot be fully defined in advance.

To determine which approach fits a given business process, use the orchestration density framework.

Evaluate Orchestration Density

Orchestration density measures the reasoning complexity of a workflow’s path toward a goal. Use these three factors to evaluate any business process and determine whether agentic or traditional automation is the correct fit.

Execution path: Can every step and outcome be defined before the process runs, or does the path depend on context at runtime?
Goal complexity: Does the process handle one contained task, or does it involve multiple competing outcomes and edge cases?
Modality mix: Does the process use structured data only, or does it also handle unstructured inputs like emails, documents, or voice?

Apply the Density Selection Matrix

Use this table to match a business process to the most appropriate tool.

Complexity Level	Recommended Tool
Low	Flow or Apex
Low to medium	Agentforce Grid
Medium	Agentforce with Flow or Apex
High	Agentforce with Agent Script

For example, a process that updates a record when a field changes is low complexity. Flow is the correct tool. A process that resolves a customer complaint received by email, where the resolution depends on message content, requires reasoning at runtime. Agentforce is the correct tool.

Validate Agent Behavior with Reasoning Traces

Testing an Agentforce implementation is different from testing traditional automation. With Flow or Apex, you verify that a process follows the correct path and produces the correct result. With Agentforce, you also need to understand how the agent reached its conclusion.

Understand Reasoning Traces

Salesforce provides reasoning traces, also called session traces or reasoning summaries, to help you inspect agent behavior. A reasoning trace shows the chain of thought the Atlas Reasoning Engine followed to reach a decision. This includes the steps the agent considered, the actions it took, and the reasoning behind each decision.

As a Business Analyst, reasoning traces are a valuable tool during user acceptance testing (UAT). They help you:

Confirm that the agent interpreted the business requirement correctly.
Identify where the agent's reasoning diverged from the expected outcome.
Provide clear, documented evidence of agent behavior for stakeholder review.

Review Traces During UAT

During UAT, do not limit your evaluation to whether the agent produced the correct output. Also review the reasoning trace to confirm the agent followed a logical path to reach that output.

For example, if an agent correctly resolves a customer complaint but the trace shows the agent considered an irrelevant action along the way, that’s worth flagging. The output may be correct, but the reasoning path can indicate a gap in the agent’s instructions or topic configuration.

Reasoning traces are available in Agentforce as session traces or reasoning summaries. Work with your administrator or developer to access them during UAT.

Understand Data Grounding for Agentforce

Agentforce agents rely on data to reason and respond. The quality of that data directly affects the quality of the agent’s output. As a Business Analyst, understanding how data supports agent behavior helps you ask the correct questions during requirements gathering and UAT.

Define Grounding

Grounding is the process of providing an agent with fresh, trusted, and relevant business context before the agent generates a response. Without grounding, an agent might produce responses that are inaccurate or inconsistent with your organization’s data. Salesforce uses Data 360 as the foundation for grounding, storing, and retrieving relevant content through a process called retrieval augmented generation, or RAG.

As a Business Analyst, you do not need to configure grounding, but you do need to understand what it depends on.

Grounding works best when:

Source data is accurate and current.
Relevant business content is available and accessible to the agent.
Data is stored and organized in a way that supports retrieval.

Ask the Correct Questions

Before an Agentforce implementation goes into UAT, confirm that the data foundation is ready.

Consider asking your team:

Is the data the agent relies on accurate and up to date?
Has the relevant business content been loaded and indexed in Data 360?
Has the agent been tested against realistic data scenarios?

These questions help you identify data readiness gaps before they affect agent behavior in production.

Apply Brand Color Palettes to Reports and Dashboards

Salesforce now allows you to configure a brand color palette once and apply it across all reports and dashboards in your organization. This reduces manual effort and helps ensure consistent, accessible data visualizations.

Set Up a Brand Palette

Administrators configure brand color palettes in Setup under Themes and Branding. Once a theme with a brand color is activated, users can apply it when building reports and dashboards.

As a Business Analyst, you are often responsible for defining reporting standards and communicating them to stakeholders. This feature supports that work by making it easier to maintain consistent visuals. Administrators configure the palette once at the org level. Report and dashboard owners then apply it with a single selection, rather than manually setting colors each time.

To apply a brand color palette:

In a report, select Brand in the report chart properties.
In a dashboard, select Brand in the dashboard properties.

Prepare for New Security Requirements

Salesforce is strengthening security controls to protect against evolving cybersecurity threats. As a Business Analyst, you might not configure these controls directly, but understanding the timeline helps you support your team and communicate changes to stakeholders.

Review the Timeline

Here are the security changes that are already in effect or coming soon.

March 2026: Email domain verification is required on a rolling basis for sending email from Salesforce.
June 2026: Salesforce enforces additional controls, including multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users, phishing-resistant MFA for Salesforce admins, step-up verification for sensitive actions, and login IP address restrictions.
Winter ’27: Salesforce retires the OAuth 2.0 username-password flow for connected apps.

Support Your Team

These changes can affect how users log in, how connected apps authenticate, and how your organization sends email. If your organization has not already addressed these requirements, raise them with your admin or project team as soon as possible.

For full details on each requirement, review the Salesforce security documentation and the Salesforce Certification Program Agreement.

Wrap Up

In this unit, you explored Summer ’26 updates that change how Business Analysts support Agentforce implementations. You learned how to evaluate automation complexity, validate agent reasoning, prepare data for grounding, and communicate new branding and security changes to your team.

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