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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next employs more agents, CDP
Salesforce overhauls Marketing Cloud with agentic AI.
Salesforce previewed Marketing Cloud Next, which is due for release next month, at its Connections conference earlier this week in Chicago.
The next version of Marketing Cloud will feature agents that can answer customers when they respond to marketing chats, texts and emails. It can also keep the conversation going when a customer shows interest and will eventually pass the leads on to marketing and sales staff for follow-up, according to Salesforce.
Marketing Cloud Next can also draft marketing campaigns and the briefs that summarize them -- potentially cutting weeks from typical marketing ideation processes. It also integrates more tightly with Salesforce's other clouds, marketing and sales being the most obvious, and service, the company said.
Just as important are tighter connections between marketing and e-commerce, according to Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, an independent research firm.
Marketing Cloud Next opens the door for AI marketing agents to automate the creation of personalized commerce content in ways that only generative AI agents can, Wettemann said. This means taking data points such as individual purchase history, web browsing behavior and marketing campaign engagement and mashing them up into custom webpages tailored to a customer's buying intent signals.
Marketing organizations now have the reach beyond traditional marketing channels, said Steve Hammond, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
"Your marketing organization now has the ability to connect seamlessly into commerce, into service, into sales, across a full customer journey," Hammond said.
Data Cloud makes another identity shift
At Connections, Salesforce executives repeatedly said Data Cloud is a customer data platform, which was also emphasized in the keynote visuals.
Salesforce's CDP has gone through many name changes over the years. Originally, it was called Customer 360 Audiences, then the Salesforce CDP, then Genie, and now it's part of Data Cloud.
Wettemann pointed out that at the Tableau Conference last April, Salesforce referred to Data Cloud as a "data lake." The truth is that Salesforce alters its language for different audiences and sometimes speaks about the same products differently, in terms that disparate audiences can understand, she said.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next will require an additional license, the costs of which have not yet been released. Salesforce plans for the transition from Marketing Cloud to Marketing Cloud Next to be straightforward.
"The details are still a little bit fuzzy on exactly what that will look like from a pricing perspective," Wettemann said. "But the idea is that if you already invested in other Salesforce tools, this is not a migration, but a convergence -- and there'll be some pricing considerations."
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
