Salesforce adds Informatica to Data 360, MuleSoft fold

Salesforce placed an $8 billion bet on Informatica, closing the acquisition last month. With that out of the way, Salesforce revealed how Informatica fits into its plans to automate the world with Agentforce.

The short answer is: by managing data that originates outside of Salesforce to drive Agentforce workflows.

Combined with Data 360 -- formerly Data Cloud -- Informatica's well-regarded master data management tools can help bring context to agentic AI workflows when enterprise customers connect their data to them, said Krish Vitaldevara, chief product officer and executive vice president at Informatica.

"AI cannot see the full picture because context is scattered, stale or inconsistent," Vitaldevara said. "AI models are intelligent, but they know almost nothing about your business … data is not enough, and context is the new currency in the world of agentic AI."

Salesforce said it will combine its own metadata model with Informatica's Enterprise Data Catalog, which will give Agentforce reach beyond Salesforce to applications that contain data crucial to customer experience workflows such as ERP.

This ability to use harmonized data from other enterprise apps is key to providing AI agents with more consistent and accurate data that Salesforce users need to make their Agentforce automations successful, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research firm Valoir. Otherwise, the agents might combine a mishmash of data -- such as from a knowledgebase of refrigerator manuals, when an AI doesn't know which model the customer using the agent owns -- and the results might not make sense.

Informatica tools can track attributes such as the origin of data, its age and provenance, its overall quality. Then it can apply governance and map it to Salesforce. It has thousands of connectors to enterprise apps and can work across Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle and hybrid cloud environments.

Golden records Informatica creates from across the enterprise, Vitaldevara said, can transform raw, isolated data into meaningful, trusted and actionable intelligence for an AI system.

"If you think about being able to do things with Agentforce, such as available-to-promise based on supply chain data -- or a customer's ability to pay based on finance application data -- few customers have been able to pull off those kinds of things with Agentforce today," Wettemann said. Informatica tools would be one way to tap into the diverse data sources needed to accomplish that -- and to properly manage metadata to deliver personalized and correct AI output.

No details were offered by Salesforce and Informatica regarding where all this product integration will leave existing Informatica customers. However, Wettemann pointed out that Salesforce has successfully preserved the culture and identity of Tableau six years after acquiring the data visualization technology for nearly $16 billion. Tableau's user community has grown to 500 user groups and a million people worldwide.

She expects something similar for Informatica. Salesforce needs to retain Informatica's existing business to ensure the merger's success. The Informatica user base tends toward serious data engineers, data scientists, data governance professionals, and like-minded individuals. This group is quite unlike the perpetually upbeat, drag-and-drop Salesforce user base.

"Salesforce recognized that Tableau has a very different user crowd. At the Tableau user event last year, they didn't talk about Salesforce," Wettemann said. "I expect that they'll do the same sort of thing with the Informatica champions, because they are going to be critical to Agentforce adoption."

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.