What to clean up, when to move to Revenue Cloud, and what agents should be allowed to do in your 2027 plan
For years, your reps have been making your pricing rules work. They know which discount rule to ignore, which bundle breaks the amendment flow, and which product needs a manual override before billing will accept it.
Agents won’t know any of that.
That’s the part of Dreamforce 2026 most TMT leaders haven’t planned for yet. The week was packed with new ways to put AI to work, and the customers I talked with in San Francisco were still sorting out where to focus, what will pay off, and how to start.
For TMT companies, I’d start where the money is: pricing and quoting. In many orgs, the rules governing those processes live in Salesforce. AIforce, announced at Dreamforce, lets AI agents use them directly from tools like Slack or Claude, within the permissions you already have. An agent could build a quote or apply a discount on its own.
There’s a catch. Those rules have been customized for years, and each change was a reasonable call at the time. After 20 years inside GTM stacks, I see the same pattern every time: the documented process and the real process drift apart, and reps are the ones holding the gap closed. An agent will walk straight into that tech debt. Putting agents on pricing and quoting means revisiting old decisions and asking which customizations still belong.
Many TMT companies are starting 2027 planning now. Three decisions belong in that plan: what to clean up, when to move off CPQ, and what agents are allowed to do.
1. Deciding what to clean up
For years, cleanup waited until the budget had room. Once agents work with your pricing rules, every outdated customization is something an agent can get wrong on a live quote. A wrong quote that gets signed becomes a contract, and the error flows straight into billing.
That makes de-customization a critical part of your AI strategy. The payoff from clearing out tech debt shows up in whether your AI projects actually work.
To decide where to start, pick one thing you’d want an agent to handle, like a mid-contract upgrade through your self-service portal, and work backward. Questions like these define the scope and build buy-in:
- What customizations does an upgrade touch, from quote to amendment to billing?
- Which would trip up an agent?
- What would it cost to remove or rebuild them?
- What would the business get back, like more upgrades without a rep or faster billing changes?
- What else depends on the same customizations?
To finance, cleanup can look like paying twice for the same system. These answers put the fixes in order and give each one a cost and a measurable result.
2. Deciding when to move off CPQ
The quoting agents Salesforce showed at Dreamforce run on Revenue Cloud. If you want them, your move off CPQ belongs on the 2027 roadmap.
That doesn’t have to mean rip and replace, and it doesn’t have to mean rushing. Salesforce has been clear that CPQ is still fully supported, so let your business roadmap set the timing.
C Spire, a Mississippi-based telecom and technology company we work with, chose not to start over, implementing Revenue Cloud directly in its production environment. For CIO Rabun Jones, the reason was simple. Ten years of customization had become a house of cards, and you don’t build agents on top of that.
In your own org, start by deciding what comes with you. CPQ customizations don’t carry over on their own, so each one gets rebuilt or left behind. Use the questions above to sort them: rebuild what the business needs and leave the workarounds where they are. Salesforce is also building a migration assistant, expected in December 2026, designed to supplement partner tooling rather than replace it.
Then sequence by business value. Move the products and pricing the business wants first, so every phase ships something usable.
3. Deciding what agents can do
Agents need rules, just like sales reps. Your sales and revenue operations leaders already set them for reps, so they should own them for agents too.
A good first agent takes on the repetitive setup work reps would rather skip, while reps keep the pricing decisions. C Spire runs a quoting agent today that handles the setup on multi-site quotes, so reps can focus on the deal itself. For SaaS teams, the same approach applies to assembling seat counts and usage tiers. Your sales and revenue operations leaders would decide:
- Which products and price books it can use
- How discounts route through your existing approval rules, with no discount authority of its own to start
- That a rep reviews every quote before it goes out
- What results would earn it more work, like faster time to quote and fewer corrections
If your pricing rules need a lot of work, start your first agent somewhere other than quoting while you clean them up.
Hold off on renewals and other quotes built on years of contract history. Revenue Cloud is stricter about contract data than CPQ was. Misaligned dates and overlapping amendments that CPQ tolerated will produce bad calculations, and an agent will repeat them on every quote that touches that data. Fix the data first.
Dreamforce also left two open questions that belong in your plan as named risks.
- The first is how much work it will take to set up and manage agent permissions alongside human ones, so budget the time.
- The second is consumption pricing like Flex Credits, which charges for every action an agent takes. Setup-heavy quotes add up fast, messy rules mean extra steps, and extra steps mean a bigger bill. Base your 2027 estimate on how many quotes, amendments, and renewals each agent will actually handle.
Fix the bones first
Your reps have been the load-bearing wall in your pricing process for years. Agents can take on that work, but only if the rules can stand on their own.
Clean up the rules. Move them to Revenue Cloud. Set clear limits for your first agents.
Get the bones right, and every quote comes out right the first time — no matter who starts it.
For the rest of the Dreamforce 2026 news, read our recap. If you want help deciding where your plan should start, Coastal’s AI Pathfinder is a no-cost session: we review your Salesforce org and the use cases you’re weighing, and you leave with a prioritized plan for your leadership team.
