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Salesforce has made it clear that it wants to dominate AI marketplace by building a robust Agentforce 360 platform, which it touts as connecting humans and AI agents in the enterprise. The company has been making strategic acquisitions and partnerships for quite some time to expand and bolster the platform, but its acquisition this week of Informatica for $8 billion might be its most important, strategic deal yet.
And it could very well indicate, industry experts say, where SaaS is heading. “This might be the most important signal yet for where the entire SaaS ecosystem is heading,” according to saasguru, an Ed-Tech company that focuses on Salesforce training and job readiness.
While the chatter is all about AI agents, copilots, and automation, the Salesforce-Informatica deal underscores the importance how critical a strong foundation is to AI. “No clean data equals no intelligent agents. No governance equals no scale,” saasguru posted on LinkedIn. “With Informatica now in the stack, Salesforce…is tightening the data/intelligence/action loop that powers true agentic AI.”
Focusing on quality data is crucial to building strong and reliable AI, but companies often struggle to get it right. Salesforce believes the Informatica acquisition will help organizations do just that.
“You have to get your data right to get your AI right. Data and context is the true fuel of Agentforce, and without clean, connected, trusted data there is no intelligence—only hallucination,” Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff said when announcing completion of the deal. “Informatica is the trusted platform that turns fragmented enterprise data into context, so every agent can reason, act, and deliver outcomes with precision.”
Informatica certainly brings an impressive and much-needed array of strengths around data to the Salesforce fold—including master data management, integration, governance, a rich data catalog, privacy and quality and metadata management.
Steve Fisher, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, said by bringing Informatica on board, Salesforce “can deliver a governed and complete data platform that powers more intelligent, contextual, and autonomous experiences across Agentforce 360.”
Platforms are seen as the foundation underpinning AI and providing the interface that allow users to access AI capabilities—they democratize access, integrate AI and accelerate development, and handle complex workflows.
Salesforce won’t waste any time integrating Informatica’s technology into its Agentforce 360. The company is looking to start reaping the benefits of the deal immediately.
“By integrating Informatica’s data management capabilities and ecosystem integrations directly into the Agentforce 360 platform, businesses around the world can drive innovation, efficiency and growth by leveraging a single vendor that unites applications, trusted data and AI agents,” Informatica CEO Amit Walia said in a statement.
Becoming part of Salesforce gibes with Informatica’s objectives and will help the company achieve them faster. “Joining forces with Salesforce enables us to drastically accelerate our mission as the ‘Switzerland’ of AI-powered data management to help organizations unlock the full value of their data and AI,” Walia said.
