Salesforce.com Inc. introduced a number of upcoming enhancements to its Salesforce Platform today at TrailheaDX, the company’s app developer conference, including a suite of low-code tools that will allow anyone to build apps regardless of technical ability.

Low-code tools make use of easy-to-understand user interface design elements to allow anyone – such as business users, administrators, designers and developers – to design and code apps and processes that can be integrated into the business processes of any organization.

“The future of app development is low-code, where anyone can participate to solve any business problem,” said Patrick Stokes, executive vice president and general manager of Platform at Salesforce. “The trusted, powerful Salesforce Platform makes it easier and faster for everyone to build apps and drive their business forward.”

The Salesforce Platform enhancements also include updates to interactive app development and automation, as well as elastic computing, artificial intelligence-driven data protection, identity management and DevOps capabilities.

According to Salesforce, there is an increasing need for businesses to stay agile in the marketplace. Some 88% of information technology leaders say workloads have increased in the past 12 months and 96% said that the current demand for apps isn’t sustainable.

To meet this demand, Salesforce believes that low-code tools may be the answer because it makes the potential pool of coders much wider. Most importantly, Salesforce Platform enables both nontechnical and advanced creators to work together on app development. That provides an environment where collaboration can be done and business logic can become part of the app development flow.

Salesforce makes it easy to compose interactive apps with low code using Dynamic Interactions, which uses pre-built web components, that communicate, exchange data and react to user interactions. They can be added to any app without code.

By automating time-intensive tasks, Salesforce Platform can free up developer time for important things such as developing the next feature. To do this, Einstein Automate allows anyone to compose workflows that automate those tasks and seamlessly integrate data. It can integrate through Salesforce AppExchange and products in OmniStudio to link together separate apps and data sources.

Another way that Salesforce Platform helps teams work together is the DevOps Center, which is a centralized location for tracking and managing changes within Salesforce for collaboration. It provides teams a place to communicate and maintain visibility across sandboxes and source code control systems.

Additionally, Einstein Data Protect will make certain that sensitive data on the platform will adhere to privacy standards, such as Social Security and credit card numbers. When sensitive data is detected in open fields, it will be flagged and the proper teams will be notified so that user information will not be leaked.

Finally, Salesforce is adding Customer Identity Plus, a way for developers to integrate a consistent customer experience across their entire organization. This is important so that they don’t have to make multiple logins for a single customer between multiple apps connected to the same organization.

CarMax Inc., a used car retailer, put Salesforce Platform’s low-code tools to use to develop new apps quickly to engage customers. The company had been using Salesforce Platform prior to 2020, but the pandemic caused the company to double down on digital tools.

“Salesforce’s low-code tools and elastic scale capabilities allowed our team to launch new customer buying experiences, like CarMax Curbside, in less than three weeks,” said Shamim Mohammad, executive vice president and chief information and technology officer of CarMax. “By using Salesforce, we are now working with a single integrated platform for managing customer relationships and automating internal processes through data-driven algorithms, machine learning and AI.”

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