Top Ten Flow Innovations for 2024

What a fantastic year 2024 has been for the Flownatics community as we’ve worked to make Flow Builder more powerful and yet more usable for more user types from admins to business users. It is always humbling for us to know that the decisions we make as a product team directly impact the daily work lives of so many people and the tremendous engagement and outpouring of enthusiasm that our Flow features receive.  Here’s a look back on our memorable Flow features in 2024 in the form of a well-beloved David Letterman Top Ten List.

1 of 10: Lets start with the Flow Builder itself that we’ve looked to simplify while enabling more sophisticated use cases for all skill levels of builders.  

The most visible update you’ve seen is with the improved 'Create New Flow' experience.  We’ve gone from having to choose from 45 Flow types into 4 stream lined categories.  It helps you quickly and easily get started creating a flow, whether you want to start from scratch with a specific flow type, start from a prebuilt template, or have Einstein draft a starting point for you. This new experience is intended to reduce the clicks necessary for commonly used flow types (with Frequently Used) or if you know exactly what you’re looking for (with search), and also to make it easier to browse through what’s available if you don’t know what you’re looking for (with improved categorization).

The new flow validation experience gives you more space to review and resolve issues in your flows. Flow Builder automatically validates flows whenever you save or activate the flow. The new Errors and Warnings panel details any problems and provides clear instructions for fixing them as well as links to open the property editors for the elements with issues. We’re excited to have more elbow room than was available when all those messages were in a small popover!

2 of 10: 2024 was a great year for Screen Flow users as we provided ways to make screens even more interactive, dynamic, and powerful. 

First, let’s talk about reactivity. In case you missed it, we’ve been dedicating a lot of time to enable you to build sophisticated, modern experiences in your screens and help you reduce the number of clicks your users have to go through. This year, we continued that investment by enabling you to not only react to changes in the components on the same screen, but also respond to things happening off-screen. To do so, we first introduced Action Buttons, which enable you to bring in data and logic from outside the screen (with the power of an autolaunched flow) by having your users click a button. Extending that framework, we recently introduced a beta of Reactive Screen Actions, which lets you configure those autolaunched flows to run automatically based on changes on the screen.

Dynamically retrieve car models based on the selected car make: with a button click

Dynamically retrieve car models based on the selected car make: without  a button click

We expanded most of our out-of-the-box components to support different input states with read-only and disabled states. Because everything is built on top of reactivity, you can build experience where inputs’ states (whether editable or read-only or disabled) can react to other changes on the screen.  

This year, we GAed the new Repeater component, which enables you to capture lists of data from your users without looping them over the same screen or having to invest in custom components. You can embed any custom component and most screen components (with the notable exception of Action Buttons). Additionally, you can provide a data source for the repeater, so you can not only capture new data but also enable your users to easily make changes to existing lists of data. 

3 of 10: We turned our attention to one of our most frequently requested updates to the Send Email Action in 2024. 

First, let’s talk about email recipients. Flow authors are no longer limited to 5 recipients for a hand-crafted email. The limit has been raised to 150! We also introduced the ability to set cc and bcc recipients, which also contribute to the overall recipient limit.

Flow authors can now also send emails with attachments. In the Send Email action, you can add a comma-separated list of Attachment or Content Document IDs to the Send Email action. There’s two updates that brought smiles to every single Flownatic!

4 of 10: Lets then talk about fundamental improvements to our Invocable Actions framework itself.  

We introduced invocable action versioning for standard actions, so now out of the box actions can release new versions of their actions without breaking your existing implementations. What this means for you is that we can more safely roll out breaking changes to actions that you’re using in your implementations. 

5 of 10: Data management and transformation was a critical area of investment in 2024 for improved access and processing of both Salesforce and external data. 

The Data Transform element already provided mapping of field and simple collection manipulations and we introduced the advanced ability to merge collections.  Flow authors can join two different types of collections together into one data structure from any data source, including external data. 

We also were paying attention to our Data elements, with two notable enhancements. We added the ability to apply a limit to the Get Records element, which supports not only explicit limits but also merge fields for those of you who want a dynamic limit. And we introduced the ability to Upsert Records and Collections where Flow authors can check for matching records, and if they exist Flow will apply changes to the existing records. If not, it will create new ones simplifying the amount of work needed to add new records to Salesforce.

6 of 10: Lets shift our attention to Flows working with Data Cloud because so much more of our data is collated and organized in our CDP.  

We supported new Data Cloud data types in Data Cloud Triggered Flows, Get Records, and Send to Data Cloud so Flow authors can now access emails, URLs, phone numbers, and more.

With Sandbox support for Data Cloud Triggered Flows, Flow authors can have the confidence to fully try out the Data Cloud data access as part of their development processes and with operational logging, Flow authors can now also log flow operational data to Data Cloud for Schedule-Triggered flows.

7 of 10: Next up is something Admins have been asking us to deliver for literally years, amounting to no less than 111,050 points on the IdeaExchange! You'd be right if you guessed Flow Approval Processes.

Flow Approval Processes is the next-generation solution for managing approvals in Salesforce. It transforms how organizations handle complex workflow approvals by introducing unprecedented flexibility and efficiency. Now process owners can administer approvals and in-flight work items in the Approvals App. Users can approve or reject a record by responding to an approval request simply via email and Flow authors can fully customize the content of the email to match the job roles of the approver.  Also all approval work items are tracked on the specific record page for full traceability of each approval.

8 of 10: We released document processing support with Intelligent Document Processing or IDP back in April, which allows you to extract data from invoices, purchase orders and other forms which we then followed up with Einstein for IDP. 

Einstein for IDP  enables improved classification of documents for routing documents within a business process and extracting information from documents including tables and key value pairs.  In addition, IDP enables users to query the document with specific questions and to summarize the content of the document for further upstream use within their automations.

9 of 10: Yes, it took me all this while to tell you about all the GenAI features in Flow in 2024!  

We introduced Agentforce for Flow with Einstein-drafted Flows to jump start Flow authoring with natural language prompts with a more advanced model and improved context selection through an advanced RAG approach.  

You asked! We heard your feedback that the biggest value you’d get out of GenAI is to summarize complex flows to better understand flows that you may have inherited or simply didn’t document well enough when they were first created. We delivered that capability with Einstein-drafted summaries.

Agents have so rapidly changed the landscape of business automation with their ability to handle a range of ambiguity to figure out the best way to automate a particular task.  With our Run Agent invocable action, it's very exciting to bring this ability of non-deterministic automation directly into the deterministic automation world of Flow.  This means that you can now invoke agents that you’ve built with Agent Builder directly within your flow.  For the right use cases, this means you no longer have to fully piece out every possible contingency within your flow and allow your agent the flexibility to handle the automation instead of creating a human centric task that a person would have to investigate and complete.  We expect this to be a huge game changer for all our Flownatics as it bridges the Flow world into agentic automation.

We also continued to improve Prompt-Triggered Flows with a larger context window size to enable our Flow authors to provide even more data and state to an executing Flow to improve the end automation outcomes. We also added support for subflows – so you can reuse logic in other prompt-triggered flows or autolaunched flows – and debugging. 

10 of 10: Our big launch at TDX 2025 is Mulesoft for Flow – a fitting finale to this Top Ten list! 

Mulesoft for Flow provides admins and business users the ability to create automations that span across SaaS systems, trigger automations from external system changes and enable Agents to act on external systems.  It provides:

• 40 out-of-the-box connectors: Use connectors to commonly used systems across the Customer 360
• Easy Configuration: Create secure connections in clicks and reuse connections in the Automation app
• Easy Field Mapping and Transformation: Perform inline complex field mappings and data transformations
• Easy User Selections: Use dynamic input and output shapes and picklist values that vary based on user choices
• Extend Agentforce Actions Outside Salesforce: Take action in external systems via workflows
• Trigger Flows Based on External System Changes: Automatically trigger a flow when changes happen in third-party systems

But Wait… There’s More: That’s not all that’s gone into Flow Builder in 2024.  While we’ve delivered many features that excited our Flownatic community, we’ve also been actively expanding to provide the automation underpinnings of our next-gen Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced products.  

As part of a multi-year journey, we have strategically invested in Flows for Marketing Cloud. Some highlights include:

New Canvas User Experience: We've completely overhauled the Flow Builder canvas, introducing a new interface that allows marketers to view operational metrics for your Active Flows more intuitively.

Enhanced Data Access: Decision elements can now seamlessly access Data Cloud data through Data Graphs directly within Flow.

Automation Events: This new event management framework comes with an extensive library of out-of-the-box events, enabling marketers to respond to critical business moments directly within Flow.

Path Experiments empower marketers to test new ideas and measure their outcomes, facilitating continuous optimization of their flows.

That’s all, folks! 2024 was an especially productive year for the Flow family and we look forward to seeing all our Flownatics at TDX this week!