Salesforce Introduces Next Gen Marketing Cloud for Improved Engagement
Salesforce is positioning their 2025 launch of Next Gen Marketing Cloud, along with updates to Agentforce (released in 2024), as a significant development in enterprise CRM and marketing. For years, “do-not-reply” messaging was a symbol of a deeper issue across the sales and marketing stack: companies were pushing content outward without any meaningful pathway for dialogue. It's not a surprise that recipients (i.e. consumers) hate this model, often likening it to a person saying something and then immediately sticking their fingers in their ears before the other person can reply. In the gen AI era, where people engage with machines daily and communicate just as they would with a human, customers will no longer tolerate the “do not reply” marketing model. It is with this in mind that Salesforce introduced the next gen of Marketing Cloud.
Next Gen Marketing Cloud introduces what Salesforce calls “agentic marketing.” Salesforce defines agentic marketing as a system where autonomous AI agents don’t just support campaigns but run them end-to-end across the full funnel. Their little army of AI agents take on the load of assembling, personalizing, and optimizing marketing engagement efforts in real time.
The Convergence of CRM and Marketing Software as a Unified Platform
Companies are using AI to reshape platforms once viewed strictly as sales or marketing tools into comprehensive systems that support the entire customer journey. The era of CRM functioning solely as a sales tool is ending. This trend is reflected in the changes that Salesforce announced with Next Gen Marketing Cloud: bringing together sales, service, and marketing into a stronger, more integrated, and unified platform. Because customers experience these interactions as a single journey, technology must also deliver a coherent, connected, and engaging experience across what were once separate domains.
Purchasing decisions for the sales and marketing suite are increasingly within cross-functional buying teams, typically consisting of CIOs and CMOs. Where CRMs used to be a platform for sales and pipeline, they are now able to provide personalized engagement across the entire lifecycle. Salesforce reports that their new version of Marketing Cloud provides teams with better data, deeper integrations, and shared accountability.
Modern day engagement depends primarily on data quality, decisioning logic, and system orchestration across the full buyer journey. Next Gen Marketing Cloud is trying to provide that full rainbow of services across the customer experience. Meanwhile, CIOs who view CRM and martech as “marketing’s problem” are likely to miss their biggest opportunity to shape customer experience at scale. Salesforce reports that its solution now offers a unified system where AI agents connect what has traditionally been fragmented: data, content, channels, and people.
What’s New in Next Gen Marketing Cloud
Salesforce has introduced autonomous AI agents that they report can independently create campaigns, personalize at scale, improve lead gen, and optimize paid media. These include:
Agentforce Campaign Creation reportedly compresses campaign development from weeks to hours. Agents help write briefs, draft content, and set up journeys using data from multiple sources like SharePoint, Google Drive, Zendesk, and internal docs. Salesforce reports that this radically increases speed to market, but it may also expose any weaknesses in data maturity and content governance.
Agentforce Personalization Decisioning uses real-time behavioral and contextual signals to serve dynamic content across email, web, and mobile. Salesforce reports that this delivers on the long-promised vision of true 1:1 marketing. But its effectiveness lives and dies on the quality of the underlying customer profiles.
Agentforce Lead Generation & Management reportedly turns every inbound interaction into an opportunity. These agents can qualify leads, have multi-turn conversations, and even schedule meetings in multiple languages (all without human intervention). In theory, this adds coverage without adding headcount. In practice, it will require strong human-in-the-loop systems to maintain brand integrity.
Agentforce Paid Media Optimization closes the loop by actively monitoring ad performance and reallocating spend based on business goals. The integration with their segmentation tools (Segment Intelligence) reportedly enables precise ROI-driven audience targeting, testing, and iteration across paid channels.
These capabilities are all now available. Agentforce Web Curation and LinkedIn integrations are set to roll out by the end of the year.
Our Take: CRM Is No Longer a Sales Tool – It’s a Growth Engine
Salesforce’s evolution of Marketing Cloud represents what the market needs right now. Long considered the safe enterprise selection for CRM, we also see that the enterprise stack has been crying out for more intelligent, cohesive engagement tools that are able to personalize at scale.
Yes, Salesforce typically represents a significant financial investment. Yes, this kind of implementation assumes a level of data maturity many organizations still lack. And no, AI agents will not fix the fact that your customer records are still riddled with duplicates and missing fields.
But this is where leadership comes in. CIOs and CMOs need to jointly own the path forward. That means budget alignment, governance, and an honest reckoning with the “dirty data” problem that has long sabotaged personalization efforts. Salesforce promotes Agentforce as being able to leverage the Data Cloud, automate at scale, and provide the tools necessary to actively improve data quality, turning long-neglected data into a valuable asset.
Salesforce’s marketing offerings have evolved through the years, which is important because it is clear that they have listened to the needs of modern marketers and made a significant investment in the platform.
We believe CRM platforms that focus solely on sales are no longer sufficient. Today’s customer lifecycle is both omnichannel and multi-functional. Salesforce is betting that if it can empower companies to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience, it will win long-term customer loyalty. By providing an enterprise-grade platform designed to support a truly holistic customer journey, Salesforce has raised the bar. The real question is: Is your organization prepared to operate at that level?
Next Gen Marketing Cloud represents a true reset. For the first time in a long time, I’m genuinely excited to build in this ecosystem again.