ExactTarget, the tool that would become Salesforce Marketing Cloud after the acquisition by Salesforce in 2013, was launched 25 years ago this year.
Marketing Cloud CMO Bobby Jania is keen to point out that Wild Birds Unlimited, the first ExactTarget customer, remains a Salesforce Marketing Cloud customer to this day. But that’s about the only thing that has remained unchanged about marketing (or Salesforce Marketing Cloud) over the past 25 years.
Jania announced today in a keynote address at the Dreamforce conference that the next generation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is called Agentforce Marketing, and bears little resemblance to the email-only tool ExactTarget introduced 25 years ago.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud grew over the years from single channel to omnichannel, integrating social media and advertising and weathering the disruption of privacy regulations such as GDPR.
And now it is evolving for the age of AI.
“We think we are now in a position to help our customers through this next chapter, this next change,” Jania told MarTech in a conversation ahead of Dreamforce.
Agentforce Marketing will focus heavily on providing an AI-powered customer experience. Jania said this is necessary to compete today as consumers are constantly comparing experiences.
“A lot of this comes from the end customers, the consumers. Their expectations are constantly changing,” says Jania. “You always compete with the best last experience.”
Dig Deeper: Salesforce Launches Agentforce 360 to Embed AI Agents Directly in Slack for Marketing Teams
What’s to come with Agentforce Marketing
Agentforce Marketing will show marketers and consumers how agentic AI, built on unified data, can radically transform the customer experience. (Now is a good time to mention that Salesforce this week changed the name of its Data Cloud product to Data 360.)
This includes capabilities such as:
Adaptive web experiences
Adaptive Web tailors an individual’s web experiences based on the real-time conversation with agents. It personalizes each visitor’s experience in real-time, automatically displaying relevant content and recommendations based on live conversations with agents, without requiring manual configuration.
Two-way email
Two-way email means the end of ‘Don’t respond’. It turns email into a two-way channel where Agentforce continues discussions or proactively initiates conversations. So you no longer have to monitor shared inboxes and wait for replies.
Travel decision
Journey Decisioning uses Agentforce to automatically guide each customer to their next best journey based on real-time behavior and data. It eliminates manual segmentation and campaign creation, creating smarter, adaptive journeys that increase engagement and efficiency.
Paid media optimization
Agentforce Marketing automatically monitors and manages ad performance on platforms like Google and Meta, taking real-time actions based on your goals and thresholds. It eliminates manual campaign reviews and budget waste by unifying performance data, automating optimizations and improving ROAS through continuous, intelligent adjustments.
Salesforce also introduced six new AI partnerships with Writer, Typeface, Jasper, WordPress, Bynder and ContentStack to help marketers generate content at scale.
Catching up on the LLM experience
Jania noted that one thing clearly on the minds of Salesforce customers is the way LLMs are changing the buying experience.
“A lot of customer feedback has been about replicating the experience you get with an LLM,” he said.
He likened it to how retailers had to catch up with Amazon as it revolutionized online shopping with personalized recommendations and other innovations. But he sees Agentforce Marketing as having a significant advantage over LLMs. They don’t have the data that brands do.
“Now imagine: what an LLM never has is the data I shared with the brand,” Jania said. “An LLM doesn’t know purchase or browsing history. Now imagine if a brand that has this rich data about me can merge it with a conversational experience.”
We couldn’t have imagined that 25 years ago.
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