The Clock Is Ticking on Open CTI: What to Do Before Time Runs Out
Salesforce has set February 28, 2028 as the end-of-life date for Open CTI, the framework underneath CTI adapters, screen pops, click-to-dial, and call logging inside Salesforce for over a decade. Most organizations read that date, note it’s almost two years out, and file it under “later.”
But one detail makes that timeline shorter than it looks: new Agentforce Service orgs have been locked out of Open CTI since early 2026. The clock didn’t just start ticking on this framework. It’s already run down further than the calendar suggests.
This Affects Every CCaaS Platform, Not Just One Vendor
There’s a temptation to treat this as a Salesforce problem or a “someone else will handle it” problem. Neither is accurate. It doesn’t matter whether an organization runs Amazon Connect, Genesys Cloud CX, Five9, Zoom Contact Center, or Cisco Webex Contact Center. If the Salesforce integration uses Open CTI, that organization is on the migration path. The framework is vendor-agnostic, which means the retirement is too.
We’ve had this conversation with contact center leaders who assumed their CCaaS vendor would quietly absorb the change on their behalf. Some vendors are building their own paths forward. Many haven’t communicated a clear one yet. Either way, the organization running the integration is the one whose agents lose screen pops, call logging, and reporting continuity if nothing is done before the deadline. In practice, that’s an agent manually alt-tabbing between the phone system and the case record on every single call, because the two stopped talking to each other.
Why Two Years Is Less Time Than It Feels Like
Enterprise migrations rarely move as fast as the calendar suggests. Between evaluating options, designing the new integration architecture, building and testing it, and running a controlled cutover, a realistic timeline runs eight to twelve weeks for a well-scoped project, and considerably longer for organizations with complex call flows, custom reporting, or multiple business units on the same Salesforce instance.
The work that looks like it can wait until next year is usually the work that decides whether this deadline feels like a planned transition or an emergency.
Teams that start now get to choose their architecture. Teams that wait until 2027 get to react to whatever their vendor has left standing.
What Actually Has to Happen
An Open CTI migration is not a single switch to flip. It’s a coordinated project with a few distinct phases, and skipping any of them is usually where things go wrong.
- Assess before you build. The first step is auditing the current Open CTI setup, including every screen pop, click-to-dial flow, CTI adapter configuration, and reporting dependency currently running on it. Most teams underestimate how much has been quietly built on top of this framework over the years.
- Design the replacement architecture deliberately. Moving to a modern integration path, whether that’s Service Cloud Voice or another supported approach, is an architecture decision, not a lift-and-shift. Call routing, business workflows, and how Salesforce objects map to the new environment all need to be worked through with intention.
- Protect business continuity through cutover. A parallel-run approach, where the old and new integrations operate side by side until the team is confident in the new one, is the difference between a quiet transition and a week where agents can’t work cases while calls are live.
- Rebuild reporting before go-live, not after. Historical dashboards and KPIs need to keep functioning under the new architecture. Reporting gaps discovered after cutover are far more expensive to fix than the ones caught during testing.
- Train and support the transition, not just the technology. Agents and supervisors need to be confident in the new setup from day one, which means training and a defined hypercare period after go-live matter as much as the technical build itself.
The Bigger Opportunity Hiding in a Forced Deadline
Here’s the part worth sitting with. A mandatory integration migration is also a natural checkpoint to look at the rest of the contact center stack. Organizations rebuilding their Salesforce integration are often also dealing with reporting gaps, workforce management inefficiencies, or a platform that was never fully optimized after its original implementation.
Treating the Open CTI migration purely as a technical fire drill means missing the chance to fix adjacent problems while the architecture is already open. Organizations that only know one side of the integration, either the Salesforce side or the CCaaS side, tend to end up solving for half the problem. The work goes better when the team doing it understands both the telephony platform and the CRM it connects to, and has done this enough times to know where the quiet failure points usually hide.
Not Sure Where This Leaves Your Integration?
February 28, 2028 will arrive either way, migration plan or not. The organizations that come out of this transition in good shape are the ones treating it as a planned modernization project starting now, not the ones waiting for the deadline to force their hand.
We help contact center leaders assess exactly what their current Open CTI setup depends on, what migrating it involves, and how long it will realistically take, before any commitment is made.