ExactTarget, the tool that would go on to become Salesforce Marketing Cloud after it was acquired by Salesforce in 2013, was launched 25 years ago this year.
Marketing Cloud CMO Bobby Jania likes 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 unchanged about marketing — or Salesforce Marketing Cloud — in the past 25 years.
Jania announced in a keynote address at the Dreamforce Conference today that the next generation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is called Agentforce Marketing, and it 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, incorporated social media and advertising and weathered the disruption of privacy regulations like GDPR.
And now, it’s evolving for the age of AI.
“We think we are now positioned to help our customers through this next chapter, this next change,” Jania told MarTech in a conversation prior to Dreamforce.
Agentforce Marketing will focus heavily on providing an AI-powered customer experience. Jania said this is necessary to compete today because consumers are constantly comparing experiences.
“A lot of this is coming from the end customers, the consumer. Their expectations are constantly changing,” Jania said. “You’re always competing against the best last experience.”
Dig deeper: Salesforce launches Agentforce 360 to embed AI agents directly in Slack for marketing teams
What’s coming with Agentforce Marketing
Agentforce Marketing will demonstrate to marketers and consumers how agentic AI, built on unified data, can radically transform the customer experience. (This is a good time to mention Salesforce changed the name of its Data Cloud product to Data 360 this week.)
This includes capabilities like:
Adaptive web experiences
Adaptive Web tailors an individual’s web experiences based on their real-time agentic conversation. It personalizes each visitor’s experience in real time, automatically displaying relevant content and recommendations based on live agent conversations, with no manual setup required.
Two-way email
Two-way email spells the end of “Do Not Reply.” It turns email into a two-way channel with Agentforce continuing threads or proactively triggering conversations—no more monitoring shared inboxes and waiting for replies.
Journey Decisioning
Journey Decisioning uses Agentforce to automatically route each customer to their next best journey based on real-time behavior and data. It eliminates manual segmentation and campaign setup, creating smarter, adaptive journeys that boost engagement and efficiency.
Paid media optimization
Agenforce Marketing automatically monitors and manages ad performance across platforms like Google and Meta, taking real-time actions based on your goals and thresholds. It eliminates manual campaign checks 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 to the LLM experience
Jania noted that one thing clearly on the mind of Salesforce customers is the way LLMs are changing the buying experience.
“A lot of feedback from customers has been about mimicking the experience you get with an LLM,” he said.
He compared it to the way retailers had to catch up with Amazon when it revolutionized online shopping with personal recommendations and other innovations. But he sees Agentforce Marketing holding a significant advantage over LLMs. They don’t have the data that brands have.
“Imagine now, what an LLM never has is the data I shared with the brand,” Jania said. “An LLM doesn’t know purchase or browser history. Imagine now, a brand that has this rich data on me is able to merge that with a conversational-like experience.”
It would not have been imagined 25 years ago.
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