A quarter-century after helping launch the cloud revolution and eventually making Salesforce the world’s #1 apps provider, Marc Benioff is accelerating his company’s transformation into an AI-data powerhouse with the planned acquisition of data-management specialist Informatica.
For about 23-1/2 of those 25 years, Benioff was an omnipresent evangelist for the power of the cloud and the transformative potential of his company’s wildly successful applications: Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce.
But as Salesforce’s quarterly revenue began to approach $10 billion — a laudable threshhold it reached three months ago — the company’s growth rate slipped under 10% for the first time in its history as Benioff began to re-imagine a future led not by his iconic apps clouds but rather by his nascent but fast-growing Data Cloud.
The same passion behind the rise of the Salesforce Data Cloud triggered the birth of Agentforce, Benioff’s broad vision for agentic AI and the birth of “digital labor” working side by side with humans and augmenting not only the output of humans but also their experiences in doing their work.
And over the past 18-24 months, Benioff’s unique storytelling shifted sharply away from Salesforce’s apps clouds and focused sharply on the power of AI and the data that fuels great AI outcomes, and in particular the surging customer demand for the Salesforce Data Cloud that he celebrated as the fastest-growing product in the company’s iconic history.
For the past year, Benioff has been positioning its powerful buildout of a single and highly flexible data model is the powerhouse behind its aggressive move into agentic AI, declaring that with Salesforce’s unrivaled set of customer data generated by its customers across that quarter-century would give its agents and other AI solutions unrivaled insights and potential.
And now comes Informatica, a data-management vendor used by many of the world’s largest companies. While Salesforce has cautioned that the deal is not expected to close until February or March of 2026, the potential impact of a unified Salesforce-Informatica tech stack is quite compelling. Let’s take a look at where the proposed acquisition will make the biggest contributions to Benioff’s plans.
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Enhanced Data Governance and Compliance
Salesforce’s May 27 press release announcing the company’s intentions to acquire Informatica calls out three indispensable data-management capabilities that will be greatly strengthened by the deal:
- Data Transparency: Informatica’s advanced integration, catalog, and lineage tools show where data comes from, how it has changed, and how it is used — crucial for auditability and regulatory compliance.
- Data Understanding: Informatica’s rich metadata, combined with Salesforce’s unified data model, will empower AI agents to interpret, connect, and act on enterprise data with meaningful context.
- Data Governance: Built-in MDM, data quality controls, and policy management ensure that all data driving AI is standardized, accurate, consistent, and secure.
And while Benioff and Salesforce, prior to the announcement of their intention to acquire Informatica, were certainly bullish on Salesforce’s own data-management chops, it is very clear from the press release that the planned intention of Informatica represents an enormous uplift in Salesforce’s data expertise. As Benioff put it in the press release, “This is a transformational step in delivering enterprise-grade AI that is safe, responsible, and deeply integrated with the world’s data.”
He also said the planned combo will be able to “forge the ultimate AI-data platform — trusted, explainable, and built to scale. Together, we’ll supercharge Agentforce, Data Cloud, Tableau, Mulesoft, and Customer 360 [the big cloud apps], enabling autonomous agents to act with intelligence, context, and confidence across every enterprise.”
How Customers Will Benefit
Salesforce emphasized Informatica’s strengths in data services, including catalog, integration, governance, quality, privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management. For customers, that means faster time to ROI for their agentic AI initiatives, less integration responsibilities, fewer vendors to wrangle, and a unified AI-data tech stack.
Salesforce also called out these specific customer benefits:
- leveraging the full power of all company data to drive AI impact at scale;
- weaving the capabilities of a Customer Data Platform into the Data Cloud;
- strengthening the autonomous skills and end-to-end outputs of Agentforce agents;
- better customer experiences with the traditional Salesforce apps because of their ability to tap into smarter and more-capable data;
- Mulesoft API’s will handle data that’s enriched, put in proper context, and fully trustworthy; and
- Tableau can deliver insights that are sharper and fully explainable.
The Future Is Now
So while the full fruit of the proposed acquisition won’t be fully realized until early next year, customers can be very confident that the transition Benioff and Salesforce are making into AI data — and the resulting agents and robots and other manifestations — are grounded in world-class data-management tools and technologies from Informatica.
Does this mean we’re seeing the beginning of the end of the applications space that Salesforce helped to pioneer? I don’t think so, not by a long shot — but what is equally true is that apps are no longer enough, and that the future is more about the AI data powering apps plus agents are becoming far more valuable than the traditional apps themselves.
And Benioff and Salesforce are clearly betting that the future is now.
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