Salesforce has announced the acquisition of Informatica.
First reported back in May, the purchase has now officially been confirmed for approximately $8BN.
The deal will see Salesforce leverage Informatica’s AI-powered cloud data management capabilities to improve its agentic AI offerings – most notably, the Agentforce platform.
Alongside the data catalog, Salesforce will also gain access to Informatica’s integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services.
The end goal is to use these capabilities to build a unified data foundation for agentic AI, enabling safe, responsible, and scalable AI agents across the enterprise.
Indeed, in discussing the news, Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff described data and context as the “true fuel of Agentforce.”
“And without clean, connected, trusted data there is no intelligence – only hallucination. Informatica is the trusted platform that turns fragmented enterprise data into context, so every agent can reason, act, and deliver outcomes with precision.
“When companies get their data right, they get their AI right, and Agentforce becomes unstoppable.”
In terms of the specifics, Salesforce also detailed how Informatica’s capabilities will sharpen its Data 360 feature by delivering cleaner, more reliable data across the business, while its integration strengths pair with MuleSoft to create a more complete, enterprise-wide connectivity layer.
That stronger foundation directly benefits Agentforce, giving autonomous agents the trusted data they need to act with confidence.
Tableau also gains from the deal, with clearer, richer context feeding into analytics and lifting the quality of insights across the board.
Making Agentforce “Unstoppable”
Benioff’s remarks around the Informatica deal helping to make Agentforce “unstoppable,” might sound like the usual vendor bravado, but they do speak to a genuine Agentforce concern: so far, the platform has been fairly stoppable.
While Agentforce has turned plenty of heads, its early momentum hasn’t quite matched the noise surrounding it.
Salesforce’s own fanfare helped create expectations that were always going to be difficult to meet, and many customers arrived at pilot projects only to realize they weren’t fully prepared for what the technology demands.
Some of that stems from implementation readiness. Consultancies and end users alike have found themselves wrestling with half-built agents, legacy processes, and a level of technical debt that makes it hard to get consistent outcomes.
The common thread is data. Agentforce can only be as sharp as the information it draws on, and too many organizations are discovering that their underlying data simply isn’t mature enough to support reliable agentic behavior.
Salesforce has offered guidance on best practices, but many customers underestimated just how much groundwork is required before Agentforce can deliver at scale.
When the data feeding the system is inconsistent or siloed, results can feel underwhelming.
Add to that a pricing model that initially confused buyers – particularly around how “conversations” were counted – and it’s clear why enthusiasm occasionally softened once projects moved from demos to delivery.
Salesforce has already taken steps to address some of those sticking points, including replacing the old per-conversation model with the more transparent Flex Credits approach.
Yet the larger barrier remains the data plumbing underneath the platform. And this is where the Informatica acquisition becomes far more than a simple expansion of Salesforce’s portfolio.
Informatica gives Salesforce a proven set of tools for tackling the data preparation issues that have slowed Agentforce deployments.
Its integration fabric, data governance controls, and MDM capabilities reach well beyond the front office, allowing organizations to clean, connect, and align information across the entire enterprise – not just whatever happens to sit inside Salesforce already.
That wider foundation is exactly what agentic systems need if they’re going to reason properly and take reliable action.
By bringing Informatica into the fold, Salesforce can help customers close the readiness gap that has held Agentforce back.
Cleaner inputs mean stronger outputs. Stronger outputs mean more trust in AI-driven automation. And with that trust, the platform finally has the conditions it needs to gain the momentum the early hype promised.
