Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: June 16, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- Connections drew approximately 10,000 marketers and partners to spotlight advances in marketing technology, with this year’s announcements emphasizing agentic marketing tools, expanded Agentforce capabilities, and significant Data Cloud enhancements.
- Salesforce unveiled Marketing Cloud Next, a unified marketing platform that integrates AI-powered campaign creation, launch, and monitoring with a simplified, guided-AI interface, enabling marketers to build and manage campaigns more quickly and efficiently.
- New Agentforce features automate key marketing workflows—launching campaigns, autonomously qualifying leads, optimizing spend, and delivering personalized web experiences—while enabling two‑way, interactive customer conversations across email, text, ads, and social channels.
- To underpin agentic marketing, Salesforce highlighted Data Cloud features, such as zero-copy integration from multiple sources, to enable the creation of a single customer profile, AI-driven segmentation, and real‑time cross‑channel data activation. These features allow marketers (and AI agents) to tap into clean, actionable data instantly.
The Event – Major Themes & Vendor Moves: Connections is Salesforce’s annual user conference, which brings together roughly 10,000 marketers and partners to focus on marketing technology, products, and workflows. This year’s Connections product announcements focused on the use of agentic marketing tools, an expansion of Agentforce capabilities within the platform, and several Data Cloud enhancements.
The big announcement from the show was Marketing Cloud Next, Salesforce’s new unified marketing platform integrating multiple technologies and features, including AI-powered campaign creation, launch, and monitoring capabilities, and a new simplified interface with guided AI interactions, providing marketers with the ability to create campaigns faster and more efficiently.
Connections also focused on new Agentforce enhancements, which are specifically focused on addressing marketing use cases. These agents are designed to launch campaigns, qualify leads autonomously, optimize marketing spend, create personalized web experiences, and enable two-way customer conversations, driving more engagement via marketing channels.
At the heart of agentic AI enablement is a company’s data. Salesforce’s Data Cloud enhancements were also announced at Connections, which are designed to help segment and organize company data so that it can be activated more easily directly by marketers or via agentic technology. Some of the enhancements that were announced include the use of zero-copy data integrations from multiple sources, the creation of a single customer profile, the use of AI-powered segmentation, and the ability to activate data across channels in real time.
All told, the new Marketing Cloud Next platform is designed to provide advanced functionality that marketers can use to help them work more efficiently and enable them to focus on higher-value tasks, such as brand storytelling and deep customer engagement.
Will Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next Deliver Real Agentic Marketing?
Analyst Take: AI – particularly generative AI and AI agents – are increasingly being used within a variety of enterprise software platforms and applications to handle a wide range of workflows and tasks. While the initial use cases generally were focused on low-hanging fruit, such as triaging, deflecting, or responding to customer service inquiries, or automating outbound sales processes, vendors are now rolling out new AI use cases that are focused on marketing functions, which, combined with sales, support, and commerce activities, may be the catalyst for enabling organization-wide improvements in efficiency, productivity, and return on investment from AI.
At Connections, Salesforce highlighted a number of innovations that are integrated into Marketing Cloud Next, which is the company’s next-gen marketing solution. But the most interesting features are those that address key friction points within marketing workflows.
First, Salesforce’s use of Agentforce to handle customer marketing outreach, via email, text, ads, and social channels is addressing the labor issue: most marketers are tasked with creating far greater amounts of content than ever before, which must be personalized to a very granular level. Conducting the segmentation, content creation, and dispatch of these pieces would be simply impossible to do manually, and Salesforce’s use of its metadata platform and agentic technology enables the automation of these processes at scale.
The use of agentic technology not only drives more productivity, it enables marketers to focus on the part of their jobs that they most enjoy: strategy, execution, and planning, instead of the drudgery of manually manipulating data, or creating campaigns from scratch.
Even more interesting is the use of agentic technology to enable two-way, interactive communication through marketing channels. Traditional marketing has been one-way, static, and barely personalized. Through the use of Agentforce, marketers are now able to engage with customers with personalized responses and information. Salesforce’s Data Cloud consolidates customer information across all touchpoints into one single source of truth, which is then used to power these two-way interactions and complete customer journeys.
Salesforce also announced unified retail bundles, which bring together ecommerce, POS, CRM, marketing, and AI capabilities into ready-to-use solutions that are designed to eliminate and replace disconnected systems that are commonly used by retailers. The use of the Salesforce platform enables retailers to create personalized offers, manage inventory visibility across channels, and track the full customer journey.
Enabling Agentic Workflows Across the Organization
From a vendor perspective, Salesforce’s focus on marketing is another key element of its strategy to enable and deploy agentic technology across the entire enterprise, encompassing a wide range of job functions, types, and workflows. A company’s product or service strategy is best served when the customer lifecycle is actively managed throughout each phase, and Salesforce’s platform-based strategy is well designed to manage this process.
Leveraging Data Cloud, which serves as the single source of truth for customer data (and can be connected to other external applications and data sources via a Zero Copy architecture) ensures that there is an immutable customer record, which can be updated in real time across each function. This ensures that customers are marketed to, sold, and supported with the contextual information surrounding each interaction, preventing embarrassing activities, such as sending a marketing message about a product that has already been purchased, or an email asking for a product review for an item for which a technical support ticket has been filed.
Enterprises are focused on driving productivity, efficiency, and better CX at scale, and agentic technology is viewed as a catalyst for achieving these goals. However, as agentic technology is being rolled out beyond pilot programs and into production, the cost of the technology will not be insignificant, particularly for organizations that opt for a consumption-based pricing model, which incurs charges based on how much the technology is being used.
As such, before committing to any specific vendor, even one that has established a significant foothold within a specific industry segment, enterprises will be seeking out proof points and examples of how agentic technology is impacting their business. Most large platform vendors are rolling out agentic AI technology, and in time, we expect that each will embrace technology protocols such as model context protocol (MCP), agent-to-agent (A2A), or other forthcoming protocols or standards to ensure interoperability within and beyond a single platform.
We believe that from a functional perspective, all of the major SaaS vendors offering agentic technology will be able to deliver a baseline functionality, given the emphasis on data quality, data availability, and agentic performance, factors that will be table stakes. That’s why vendors will need to demonstrate that their technology can execute on their marketing and ROI claims, which are dependent upon a wide range of initial and ongoing costs, from licensing fees to integration and customization costs and ongoing usage and maintenance costs.
What to Watch:
- Salesforce is embedding AI agents (Agentforce) directly into campaign creation, lead qualification, spend optimization, and even two‑way customer dialogues. Competitors will need to accelerate their own “agentic” roadmaps to automate content generation, personalization, and real‑time interactions at scale.
- Marketing Cloud Next bundles campaign creation, launch, monitoring, and analytics into one guided‑AI interface. Watch for competitive responses that collapse disparate marketing modules (email, SMS, ads, social, analytics) into a single, AI‑guided canvas—simplifying both the customer experience and internal marketing user experience.
- Salesforce’s Data Cloud enhancements—from zero‑copy integrations to AI‑powered segmentation and a single customer profile—mean marketers can activate data instantly across campaigns and agents. Rival platforms should consider investment into real‑time data fabrics (no ETL lag), unified customer graphs, and on‑the‑fly segmentation.
- By packaging e‑commerce, POS, CRM, marketing, and AI into turnkey retail solutions, Salesforce is pushing beyond horizontal stacks toward industry‑specific, pre‑configured clouds. Watch for competitors to launch similar vertical bundles with built‑in AI workflows to accelerate time‑to‑value.
- As agentic capabilities shift from pilots to production, enterprises will scrutinize cost structures (especially consumption‑based pricing) and demand hard ROI metrics. Vendors must be prepared with benchmarked case studies, TCO calculators, and transparent usage‑to‑value dashboards.
You can read the press release highlighting Salesforce’s announcement on Marketing Cloud Next here.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
