With Salesforce Connections kicking off later today, many customers are looking ahead to what’s next for the CRM giant, and how the marketing and CX landscape may evolve over the next 12 months.
According to one Salesforce partner, this year’s event is expected to mark a shift from AI ambition to real-world execution, with a strong focus on agentic marketing operations, composable architectures, and practical use cases that reduce day-to-day complexity for marketers.
For marketers, Connections 2026 may signal the beginning of a more operational, less theoretical AI era.
Speaking with CX Today, Lauren Noonan, VP of Growth & Alliances, at Sercante | Trilliad, a Salesforce Partner, encapsulates the expected theme from Salesforce Connections, transitioning from AI hype to execution.
“If you’re not actually building proofs of concept or testing AI in the day‑to‑day now, you are unfortunately behind,” she explained.
“This is the year where marketers move from talking about AI to actually shipping with it, and that’s a very different conversation.”
Agentic Marketing Operations Moves from Concept to Reality
At Salesforce Connections 2026, agentic marketing operations are expected to move from an emerging concept to a defining pillar of Salesforce’s marketing vision.
Rather than positioning AI as a collection of isolated features, Salesforce is expected to showcase how agentic AI can fundamentally reshape the way marketing teams operate day to day.
Why Marketing Ops Is Ripe for Agentic AI
Noonan predicts that one of the dominating themes at Salesforce Connections 2026 will be agentic marketing operations, where AI agents take a far more active role in managing campaign execution from end to end.
In fact, “there’s likely going to be a lot of announcements about a new agentic console that marketers can use to support them across the campaign build lifecycle,” Noonan argued.
The opportunity here is to automate the operational work that sits between strategy and launch, where agentic tools could orchestrate many of these tasks automatically, enabling teams to focus more on planning, creativity, and customer engagement.
“Anywhere from two to six weeks is the average time I hear from the moment a campaign brief is written to when it’s deployed,” Noonan continued.
“That’s just insane when you break down how manual every step still is.”
Despite advances in marketing technology, many organizations continue to rely on manual-intensive workflows that slow execution and limit agility.
Fixing the Usability Gap in Marketing Cloud
Salesforce’s growing emphasis on agentic workflows could also help address the ease of use challenge for marketers, with many finding it difficult to navigate and manage the platform efficiently as campaign execution processes become more complex.
“One of the biggest gaps Marketing Cloud has had over the last two years has been ease of use, so innovating through the lens of the marketer is going to win over some hearts and minds,” explained Noonan.
As a result, agentic functionality could simplify complex workflows, reduce manual work to execute campaigns, and make complex capabilities more accessible.
Furthermore, teams will often spend extra time managing campaign production and deployment, leaving little time to analyze results and refine next steps.
“Before a campaign even launches, marketers are already onto the next brief,” she argues.
“There’s no time left to analyze what worked, what didn’t, and how to optimize. We have to break that cycle to unlock the next era of value.”
Automating administrative and operational tasks could therefore free marketers to focus on performance improvement, helping organizations gain greater value from marketing investments.
From AI Hype to Proof-of-Concept Execution
Noonan also expects Salesforce Connections 2026 to highlight a broader shift in how organizations are approaching artificial intelligence, seeing the conversation move from questioning its importance to demonstrating tangible progress.
Even today, many organizations are continuing to explore AI’s potential by developing strategies and discussing future applications, but not moving toward implementation.
As a result, customers are increasingly being judged by their ability to translate those AI ambitions into practical use cases.
How the Customer Conversation Has Changed
Customer attitudes toward AI have evolved over the past three years, from where many organizations were concerned about whether they were falling behind competitors to customers now shifting their attention toward developing formal AI strategies and roadmaps.
“In 2024, customers were asking, ‘If I’m not doing something with AI, am I behind?’ In 2025 it became, ‘If I don’t have a plan, am I behind?’,” said Noonan.
“Now the reality is, if you’re not testing or building proofs of concept, you are behind.”
As a result, customers are looking to leadership teams and stakeholders to move AI initiatives beyond strategic planning and toward delivering measurable outcomes.
Urgency Without Panic
However, many businesses still have a meaningful window of opportunity to establish their AI capabilities, provided they begin taking action now.
“If teams start putting plans in place now and are testing by the end of 2026, they’ll still be in a good position. But going into 2027 without anything live genuinely worries me,” she notes.
As AI continues to be associated with competitive advantage, organisations that begin testing now can build real practical experience and identify high-value use cases before large-scale adoption becomes a standard industry expectation.
However, media narratives and industry hype can distort perceptions of progress, exposed to headlines about AI breakthroughs and high-profile success stories.
“Everyone feels one step behind the hype because they read about what others are doing,” she explained.
“In reality, most organizations are still catching up in the day-to-day.”
Connections 2026 may therefore serve as a reality check for many organizations as they work to move AI from experimentation into everyday operations.
Simplifying Personalization, Composability, and the Human Role
Thirdly, Salesforce Connections 2026 is expected to place a strong emphasis on simplifying the customer journey, as Noonan believes Salesforce will help make AI and personalisation more practical and accessible.
This includes supporting composable technology architectures and ensuring that AI serves as a tool that enhances human agent capabilities, as the next stage of marketing innovation focuses on making advanced capabilities easier for everyday marketing teams.
Salesforce Embraces Composable, Real-World Tech Stacks
One of these expectations includes a greater acknowledgement of modern marketing realities, likely seeing an embrace of composable architectures that enable organizations to combine technologies in line with needs.
“The second thing I think we’re going to see is Salesforce finally leaning into the concept of headless and composable, not necessarily pigeonholing their customers into using all things Salesforce,” she explained.
“Customers are using a compilation of different technologies, and Salesforce needs to make sure those tools can be picked and chosen and still play nicely together.”
As organizations build technology stacks with solutions from multiple vendors rather a single provider, interoperability, flexibility, and integration become more important than maintaining platform exclusivity.
If Salesforce responds to this enterprise reality, customers will be able to connect and orchestrate technologies more effectively while preserving the freedom to choose the tools that fit their environment.
Why ‘Hyper-Personalization’ Is Becoming a Barrier
The industry’s focus on “hyper-personalization” has unintentionally created barriers to adoption, despite the practice remaining a core objective in marketing.
This level of complexity can, in fact, often discourage organizations from pursuing personalization initiatives at all.
In fact, current advancements within Marketing Cloud and related Salesforce technologies are reducing many of these obstacles by embedding decisioning capabilities into the platform.
“As soon as you say hyper-personalization, people think they need a data science team, expensive models, and months of work, and they actually don’t anymore,” notes Noonan.
“You don’t need a whole data science team building models that are stale by the time they go live, the capability to identify the segment, message, and tactic already exists now.”
Personalization should therefore be positioned as accessible and operationally achievable, allowing marketers to deliver relevant experiences without the heavy technical burden from previous personalization programs.
Keeping Humans at the Centre
However, despite expectations for expanded AI capabilities and automation, Noonan does not believe the future of marketing is centred on replacing human expertise, expecting Salesforce to reinforce the view that AI should act as a support mechanism.
This includes removing low-value administrative work and allow marketers to focus on activities where human judgement remains essential.
“AI should take people out of the admin work so they can focus on value-add,” she argues.
“The strategy, the ideas, and the optimization that actually move the brand forward.”
Allowing AI to create more opportunities for marketers will enable them to concentrate on strategic planning and customer understanding and help organizations extract greater value from both technology investments and teams.
