Salesforce Marketing Cloud Embraces the Agentic Era

Twenty-five years have passed since the launch of ExactTarget, the pioneering email marketing platform that Salesforce later acquired and transformed into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Remarkably, Wild Bird Unlimited, the very first ExactTarget client, continues to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud today. While that customer relationship has endured, virtually everything else about marketing and the platform itself has undergone dramatic change.

At the Dreamforce Conference, Marketing Cloud CMO Bobby Jania unveiled the next evolution: Agentforce Marketing. This new generation bears almost no resemblance to the original email-only tool. Over the years, Marketing Cloud expanded from single-channel outreach to full omnichannel engagement, integrated social media and advertising capabilities, and adapted to major privacy regulations like GDPR. Now, it is stepping decisively into the AI era.

Jania explained that Agentforce Marketing is designed to meet rising consumer expectations by delivering AI-powered customer experiences. “A lot of this is coming from the end customers, the consumer,” he noted. “Their expectations are constantly changing. You’re always competing against the best last experience.” He emphasized that brands must now leverage AI to keep pace with these evolving demands.

Agentforce Marketing introduces a new wave of AI-driven capabilities powered by unified customer data, now centralized within Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud). These features mark a significant shift in how marketers engage, personalize, and automate customer interactions.

Smarter, Real-Time Engagement

Adaptive Web Experiences:
This feature customizes each visitor’s journey on a website in real time. Using live data and AI-driven conversations, it displays personalized content and recommendations instantly, no manual setup required.

Two-Way Email:
Traditional email blasts become dynamic exchanges. Agentforce can maintain ongoing conversations or initiate new ones directly through email, removing the need to monitor shared inboxes.

Journey Decisioning:
AI determines the best next step for every customer based on live behavioral signals and data insights. It automates segmentation and campaign flow, making each customer journey faster and more responsive.

Paid Media Optimization:
Agentforce continuously evaluates ad performance across Google, Meta, and other major platforms. By consolidating data and automatically refining campaigns, it minimizes wasted spend and boosts return on ad spend.

Expanding the Ecosystem

Salesforce also revealed six new AI partnerships, with Writer, Typeface, Jasper, WordPress, Bynder, and ContentStack, to help marketing teams generate high-quality content more efficiently and at scale.

During the announcement, Jania discussed how large language models (LLMs) are reshaping consumer expectations. He noted that buyers now expect the same fluid, conversational interactions they experience with LLMs, comparing this transformation to the early e-commerce era when retailers raced to match Amazon’s personalization.

However, Jania emphasized one major advantage for brands adopting Agentforce Marketing: access to their own first-party data.

“What an LLM never has,” he explained, “is the data I shared with the brand. An LLM doesn’t know my purchase or browsing history. Now imagine a brand merging that depth of data with a conversational-like experience.”

This integration of private customer data with conversational AI represents a breakthrough moment, one that would have seemed impossible twenty-five years ago.

(Source: MarTech)