Impact of ChatGPT on Salesforce Developers

Check out this insightful post to know whether ChatGPT, a sensational AI-powered paradigm, is truly a game changer in the Salesforce world.

Niels Bohr, the eminent physicist, once remarked it’s hard to predict, especially the future, and rightly so. Groundbreaking technological paradigms powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are evolving at a breakneck pace, opening up new possibilities that one could hardly imagine just a few years ago. One of the revolutionary AI-enabled developments that has the power to dramatically transform the world of technology and business is ChatGPT. Today, we’ll see what ChatGPT is all about and its implications for the Salesforce ecosystem.

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI-empowered chatbot that leverages state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to interact with people using simple language. The novel paradigm can understand languages we speak such as English and create detailed, impressive-looking text.

Sam Altman, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OpenAI, the organization behind the development of ChatGPT, recently said the chatbot’s capabilities are fairly limited and it would be a mistake to believe it is fully reliable. Mr. Altman also pointed out significant amount of work needs to be done to make the application more robust and dependable.

While the statements of Mr. Altman may downplay the immense potential of ChatGPT, there is no doubt it’s a radical technological paradigm. As a matter of fact, the NLP-based tool may have even written an article such as this and you would not even know it was the work of a software application.

How Does ChatGPT Work?

Users need to type a request, very similar to a search query in Google, but using long sentences like you’d converse with a person. The chatbot answers the request and provides the required information in such a manner as if it is a human being. It’s important to note ChatGPT is not creating new content but utilizing enormous volumes of information available on the web to provide a coherent response.

If you type a clear, properly-structured request, the results will be even more accurate. You should bear in mind ChatGPT is not 100% precise. You also need to be able to comprehend the issue you’re trying to resolve and verify the response provided by the tool. But, having said this, ChatGPT will prove to be a very useful digital assistant.

We put the AI-powered application to test by typing in 3 requests.

Request 1 – Tell us the story of Salesforce and the vision of its founder

I was amazed by the high quality of the response provided. Although the word would was repeated multiple times in the second paragraph of the answer, it was indeed an excellent job by the chatbot, considering it is still in its early stages.

Request 2 – Write an Apex trigger to create an opportunity on account creation in Salesforce

A pretty good work by the AI-powered tool.

Request 3 – Write a test class for the above piece of code

Another decent job, by any standard.

What Does This Mean for Salesforce Professionals?

As you can see, ChatGPT delivers results in text and not graphics. This makes it a good tool to generate Apex code (or for that matter, code in any programming language). For instance, it can create formulas, rules for validating data, Lightning Web Components (LWCs) and unit tests for LWCs. However, it must be remembered it can’t come up with a Salesforce Flow or a declarative result. At the moment, it can only generate blocks of Extensible Markup Language (XML) code from declarative actions; for example, it can create various types of objects and fields.

We all need to understand ChatGPT is good at handling tasks that have a clearly-articulated, narrow scope. However, as the request becomes broad-based, the tool becomes less effective. You can’t ask it to come up with a piece of code for an aerobics center, no matter how detailed your request is.

This brings us to a million-dollar question – will ChatGPT take the place of Salesforce developers, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the Salesforce ecosystem? Well, I don’t think so. ChatGPT is adept at learning billions of lines of code but it is not always accurate. However, it can do a lot of (or almost all) mundane coding tasks, which can be reviewed and modified if necessary by an experienced developer. This is likely to put the jobs of junior developers at risk.

But this is only one side of the story. People who are relatively new to Salesforce development can hone their skills to be able to type a request in a well-defined manner, enabling ChatGPT to provide the desired results. Having said this, they must be able to validate the answers provided by the AI-powered tool. So, ChatGPT is no substitute for a highly-skilled Salesforce professional.

Final Thoughts

I believe there is a huge potential for enhancing Salesforce development efficiencies using ChatGPT. But, at the end of the day, its efficacy is only a function of its user’s ability to make the right request the right way. I’m sure as the tool gets better over the coming years, many companies would be interested in utilizing its capabilities for use cases it can handle effectively – but its role would be limited to assisting development teams in augmenting their efficiency, and any apprehension that it’ll eliminate ‘human Salesforce developers’ completely is far-fetched.

Hope you liked this post. What do you think will be the impact of ChatGPT on Salesforce developers? We’d love to know.

About Solunus

Solunus is a dedicated Salesforce partner organization, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. We provide Salesforce integration services that help you make the best use of customer response systems such as chatbots. Our unrelenting focus on comprehending the unique needs of our clients coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to deliver the perfect solutions that create the best value for IT and business analytics firms.