Salesforce’s marketing community has converged in the Windy City of Chicago for the 2025 Connections conference, Salesforce’s annual gathering for marketing, commerce, and service professionals of all levels to connect with peers, be inspired, learn from thought leaders and experts, and discover the latest trends in marketing and upcoming marketing product innovations. The Cloud for Good team at Connections had an opportunity to learn about Salesforce’s bold vision of agentic marketing, as well as the latest and greatest marketing innovations and news. Below, we’ve highlighted the most exciting marketing announcements at Connections 2025.
Agentic Marketing
At Connections’ main keynote, Salesforce announced its vision for the future of marketing as agentic marketing. The move towards agentic marketing is in response to challenges seen in common marketing practices today, such as the use of digital ads composed of static webpages with a form, one-size-fits-all marketing messaging and content with a link, or of unmonitored “Do Not Reply” email addresses and phone numbers that send promotional marketing messages but do not receive or respond to inbound communications. Relationships can’t be built with “Do Not Reply” marketing that blocks conversations. In contrast, with agentic marketing, human marketers alongside AI agents can transform every marketing channel and message—even “dead-end” messages—into agentic engagements that spark two-way conversations and more interactive, effective, and personalized one-to-one experiences with customers across the marketing funnel. According to Salesforce President & CMO Ariel Kelman, agentic marketing will change everything about how organizations market to their customers and audiences, launch and optimize campaigns, engage across channels, qualify leads, and more.
Salesforce’s agentic marketing vision will be made possible with the Agentforce platform, Salesforce’s agentic AI layer, where AI agents grounded in customer data will plan and act to power a digital labor workforce and augment and upskill marketers’ work so that they can focus on more meaningful efforts.
For marketers, agentic AI in marketing means:
- Launching campaigns more quickly in a matter of days, not weeks
- Autonomously qualifying leads around the clock
- Proactively surfacing insights
- Scaling brand governance across any marketing channel
- Adapting every web experience for every customer
- Eliminating “Do Not Reply” marketing messages
Introducing Marketing Cloud Next
At Connections, Salesforce announced the release of Marketing Cloud Next (now in GA) as a full-funnel agentic marketing solution. Marketing Cloud Next is built on the core Salesforce Platform to bring users core marketing functionality and power every Salesforce campaign. It leverages Agentforce to connect marketing channels together, allowing users to collaborate with AI agents at each stage of the marketing journey. Designed as an open agentic martech stack, Marketing Cloud Next works with any large language model (LLM), marketing channel, data with zero copy, and a wide variety of systems, from packaged software, custom applications, and integrations. At the foundation of Marketing Cloud Next is Data Cloud, enabling users to activate and bring their data together to create unified customer profiles that every team in their organization can use to deliver one-on-one personalization at every touchpoint. And, with Salesforce’s metadata platform, Marketing Cloud Next also makes it possible for every team in an organization to utilize the same data metrics, deploy cross-cloud triggers without code, and B2B and B2C functions within the same application.
During Connection’s main keynote, Steve Hammond, EVP & GM, Marketing Cloud at Salesforce shared that the strategy around Marketing Cloud Next involves combining the best marketing technologies and the best, most current AI technologies to provide new marketing capabilities that have not been available before. Through Marketing Cloud Next, Salesforce has converged its standalone marketing technologies—Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot), Marketing Cloud Engagement, Marketing Cloud Personalization, and Marketing Cloud Intelligence for users into one platform. This is a significant move, as Salesforce users no longer have to stitch together connected, but sometimes still separated individual marketing solutions. Within Marketing Cloud Next, customers will find Marketing Cloud Advanced/Growth Edition, Salesforce Personalization, Marketing Intelligence, and Loyalty Management. (Be on the lookout for more content about these in the coming months!)
For current users of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement who are wondering if they need to migrate to Marketing Cloud Next, Hammond explained that users can choose to have Marketing Cloud Next run in parallel with their existing marketing functionalities and tools, and sync with their campaigns, segments, and contacts. Then, once users are ready and comfortable with the new features and functionality, they have the option to switch over to Marketing Cloud Next’s user interface and take advantage of its features across all marketing and communications efforts.
Exciting Agentforce Innovations for Marketing
Salesforce leaders at Connections announced the release of several Agentforce innovations purposely built for marketing in Marketing Cloud Next, with many of them now in General Availability.
Agentforce Campaign Creator
Now in GA
Enables marketers to use Agentforce to build and deploy a campaign from brief to launch in as little as a few hours. The AI turns campaign ideas into actions and offloads any grunt work involved in campaign creation, freeing up time for marketers to focus on more strategic efforts.
Agentforce Personalization Decisioning
Now in GA
Uses real-time signals like customer behavior, preferences, and intent to recommend tailored content and product offers across marketing channels like web, email, and mobile.
Agentforce Web Curation
October 2025 Release
Dynamically assembles personalized web marketing experiences, adapting layouts, messaging, and recommendations for every visitor based on their context and behavior.
Agentforce Lead Generation & Agentforce Lead Management
Now in GA
Build and deploy a lead qualification AI agent that autonomously adds leads to nurture programs, retrieves lead scores, recommends tailored content, and turns any interested leads into pipeline. Agents instantly engage, nurture, and qualify leads across web and email 24/7, using real, personalized conversations instead of canned replies. Once a qualified lead is ready to proceed with a transaction, the agent then hands them off to a human sales representative.
Agentforce Paid Media Optimization
Now in GA
AI agents monitor ad performance around the clock. If an ad is underperforming, Agentforce will automatically pause them. The AI will also recommend improvements to targeting and adjust ad spends instantly based on defined business goals.
Segment Intelligence
Now in GA
Helps marketers identify which audiences drive the highest ROI so that they can finetune their campaigns for maximum impact. Users can leverage Segment Intelligence to also create smarter segments on the fly and improve ad targeting. This feature also comes with a Segment Intelligence dashboard.
Agentforce Command Center
July 2025 Release
This exciting, upcoming feature will provide users with a central hub and interface that displays a visualization of every activity Agentforce is doing for an organization within Salesforce. The Agentforce Command Center is where users can look at every single agent their organization has built and deployed, the impact they are making, all the sessions that have been completed, each agent’s average latency rate in seconds, quality feedback score rating, and more. It also comes with an Agent Analytics tab where users can view their Agent Health Scores, engagement rate, and other metrics that offer real-time visibility into an agent’s performance.
The Future of Marketing With Agentic AI
Salesforce’s vision for the future of marketing is an agentic one, and Connections has given us a glimpse into what agentic marketing looks like with Agentforce and Marketing Cloud Next. As a premier Salesforce partner and Agentforce partner, and with experience implementing Marketing Cloud for nonprofits and higher education institutions, Cloud for Good greatly looks forward to all the ways our clients can take advantage of agentic marketing tools like Marketing Cloud Next to drive one-to-one, personalized conversations that deepen relationships with constituents or building compelling campaigns and appeals for fundraisers that can cultivate giving and generosity.
Get in touch with our experts if you are interested in elevating your nonprofit’s or higher ed institution’s marketing strategy with agentic marketing software like Marketing Cloud Next.
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