Likely to Ship
Summer ‘26 full deployment by late June. Agentforce 3 Command Center GA by August. Additional AgentExchange ISV onboarding waves. EU AI Act enforcement starts August 2. ServiceNow Zurich widely adopted.
Salesforce Summer ‘26 entered preview April 18 with major Data Cloud and Agentforce updates including unified topic management and granular guardrail configuration; full GA window is June 12-26 across instance pods. Microsoft Dynamics 365 2026 Wave 2 lands September with Copilot autonomous-action expansion. HubSpot Spring ‘26 ships June with Breeze outcome-pricing-aware analytics. ServiceNow Zurich completed late February rollout; Now Assist Skills with native MCP support hits GA in May. Watch the EU database for AI Act registrations to spike in late July as deployers race the deadline.
Likely to Break
First high-profile customer-facing agent incident with regulatory attention. Prompt injection attack on public agent earning press coverage. Cost overrun on an outcome-pricing deployment. Expect these as the AI-native era matures.
Specific failure modes likely in Q2. A consumer-facing agent generates a defamatory response and triggers a CFPB or FTC inquiry. A travel or financial-services bot agrees to a refund or rate it shouldn’t honor. A prompt-injection campaign exfiltrates contacts from a poorly-defended Service Cloud agent. An outcome-pricing deployment hits an unexpectedly successful intent and produces a six-figure overage that ends up at the CFO. Each scenario has happened in 2024-2025 at smaller scale; Q2 2026 is when they hit a Fortune 500 brand and become a board-level case study.
Expect Surprises From
Cheaper voice AI than projected. A dark-horse open-source model matching proprietary in specific domains. An unexpected regulatory ruling (CCPA/CPRA or DOJ/FTC action) affecting CRM AI. Prepare governance to absorb.
Watch list. Voice: Sesame, Sierra, and OpenAI’s Realtime API are pushing per-minute prices toward $0.05. A sub-cent breakthrough would rewrite CX economics. Open-source: a Chinese lab (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi) shipping a frontier-quality reasoning model under MIT or Apache license. Regulation: Colorado AI Act enforcement starts February 1, 2026 — first enforcement actions likely in Q2. The CFPB’s 2025 advisory on AI in consumer finance could escalate to formal rulemaking.
Plan For
Assume volatility. Keep change pace manageable. Invest in governance, evaluation, and observability — the boring work that prevents dramatic failures. AI’s hype cycle has matured; discipline matters more now than ambition.
Three governance investments that pay off in Q2. Eval coverage for every customer-facing agent with weekly regression checks. Kill switches tested monthly with documented RTO. Vendor-diversity routing (Portkey, LiteLLM) so a single provider outage doesn’t take production down. The teams that ship AI smoothly through Q2 will be the ones that built these in Q4 2025; if you haven’t, prioritize over net-new feature work.
What to Do This Week
Build a one-page risk register for Q2 listing the three highest-likelihood failure modes for your AI deployment with current mitigations and gaps.
