Connections Marketing Cloud Next Keynote Recap

Another Connections in the books! It was so great to see and meet many of you in person in Chicago. We had a fun and fulfilling two days of learning and networking. Our goal going into the event was to help prepare marketers for the age of AI agents. Our sessions took deep dives into agentic marketing, including how it works in Marketing Cloud Next. We wanted you to leave Connections with a strong understanding of AI agents, what’s needed to build a data foundation, how to use data and AI to create and optimize campaigns, and the tools to train your teams.

Agentic marketing puts autonomous AI agents to work across every touchpoint. Unlike traditional automation, marketers define the strategy — such as “increase loyalty among at-risk customers” — and AI agents act. These AI agents transform ‘do-not-reply’ messages into agentic engagements — where every channel becomes a two-way conversation. And, behind the scenes, they handle complex tasks like campaign assembly, performance optimization, and 1-to-1 personalization at a scale that was previously unattainable.

Built natively on the Salesforce Platform, Marketing Cloud Next brings agentic marketing to life with actionable data, cross-departmental workflows, and autonomous AI agents embedded across the entire customer funnel. Here’s what that means for your work:

• You’ll have power and flexibility. Marketing Cloud Next is easy to use across setup, segmentation, campaign management, orchestration, personalization, and analytics.
• You’ll get an all-in-one platform with Data Cloud built in, giving every team access to unified, actionable customer profiles. This makes it easier to target the right audiences, measure ROI, and optimize campaign performance in real time.
• You’ll benefit from a single AI personalization engine across all customer touchpoints, so you can turn offers into two-way conversations, personalize content at scale, and ensure every handoff is seamless.
• You’ll unlock limitless scale by pairing marketers with AI agents, so you can co-create campaigns, set goals that self-optimize, and automate time-consuming tasks like segmentation, content creation, and decisioning.

In our Marketing Cloud Next Connections keynote, we walked through five steps customers can take today to bring the tool into your existing practice to get immediate value. We showed how customers like the Indiana Fever are using insights to drive better audience engagement with Agentforce.

In this blog, we’ll examine these five steps so you can use the power of Marketing Cloud Next, with current Marketing Cloud products, to bring AI agents into your marketing practice.

1. Connect your data to Data Cloud
2. Personalize with Agentforce
3. Unify loyalty promotions
4. Manage consumption in Digital Wallet
5. Bring journeys into Flow

Step 1: Connect your data to Data Cloud 

For years, targeting the right audience has been mostly guesswork. It’s been common practice to plan segments in email threads with little insight and no visibility into performance. 

To overcome these challenges, Pacers Sports & Entertainment unified their fan data from 30+ sources to create a clear, actionable view of every individual—like a fan from out of state who’s bought premium merch to support the Indiana Fever, but has never attended a game. 

The team can build and refine segments like this on their own, in minutes — not days — without data science teams or manual exports, and then activate hyper-personalized campaigns. Agentforce will enable them to proactively identify high-potential audiences — like out-of-state superfans — suggest the next best action, and even identify affinities that will determine common interests or engagement behavior. This type of experience is possible for all marketers from any type of business.

Step 2:  Personalize with Agentforce

Personalization has long been a buzzword, but it’s never been easy to accomplish. Many marketers are stuck with manual processes, siloed data, and complex scripting that doesn’t give customers what they want: the most relevant CTA or recommendation. Even something simple like “Hi {first name}” can be tough to get right without good data.

AI is the only thing that can do true 1-to-1 personalization at scale. Marketing Cloud Next has a simplified user experience and personalization powered by Agentforce. 

Within a campaign, marketers can get help from AI agents to dynamically personalize email content and recommend offers based on criteria like location, lifetime value, and interest, all without developer support. Even web chats become a two-way, tailored experience, powered by AI agents that marketers can configure with just a few clicks. Every prompt is grounded in trusted first-party data and AI outputs are designed to keep humans-in-the-loop, so that each recommendation is transparent, auditable, and marketer-approved.

The result is a seamless, connected campaign that adapts to every customer moment—faster, smarter, and more relevant than ever. It’s true 1-to-1 personalization, scaled by AI, so marketers can focus less on tactics, and more on strategy and creativity.

Bonus: We also added two new features to Salesforce Personalization: Custom Attribution and AI Recommendations, which are generally available. Now, customers can define their attribution funnel by choosing any engagement signal or metric in a given timeframe, offering flexibility to measure success. Customers can also set custom business objectives – like revenue or engagement goals – and AI will optimize recommendations and guide the end customer’s experience towards that goal.

Step 3: Unify loyalty promotions 

Loyalty programs often run in silos — disconnected from marketing campaigns and lacking the context to truly drive engagement. And with customer acquisition costs at an all-time high, brands can’t afford to miss the chance to turn one-time buyers into lifelong fans. While, 43% of customers say they’ll leave a brand after just one bad experience, loyalty programs are the hook that keeps 72% of customers coming back. 

Marketing Cloud Next changes that. With built-in Loyalty Management and Agentforce Promotion Creation, you can embed loyalty moments directly into your campaigns. Agentforce will generate and update the promotion, help customize and track rewards, and surface the right incentives at the right time in a campaign. You can even take loyalty to the next level with features like Clubs & Communities.

This helps you deepen advocacy and create new revenue opportunities with exclusive, curated experiences – like a new culinary club. You can now manage subscription details, club benefits, eligibility and member status all in one place. 

Agentforce is redefining how marketers scale loyalty and personalization by turning fragmented workflows into fluid, connected experiences. The result? Loyalty becomes a connected experience that’s part of a continuous, personalized journey.

Step 4: Manage consumption in Digital Wallet 

Even the best marketers lose time to operational busywork: chasing down information across different tools and teams, managing scattered spreadsheets, and guessing at credit consumption across business units. Without a centralized view, planning often feels reactive instead of strategic.

Enter Digital Wallet, now generally available in Marketing Cloud Next. This is the number 1 voice-of-the-customer request – it gives marketers a single, real-time view of messaging, data, and AI usage across business units, so you can  plan with precision. Need to see how a campaign is performing or how many messaging credits you have left? It’s all right there. No more digging or manual updates.

In Marketing Cloud Next, a shared, interactive calendar gives you visibility into every in-flight and planned campaign, while built-in performance insights surfacing campaign performance without the need to configure anything. And now with Digital Wallet, real-time consumption data can become a part of your campaign planning—making it easier than ever to see the full picture from the start.

Step 5: Bring journeys into Flow 

Too often, marketing journeys operate in isolation, disconnected from Sales, Service, or Commerce. That means clunky handoffs, fragmented experiences, static journeys that don’t adapt to changing customer behavior, and missed opportunities to grow relationships. 

Marketers are forced to manage exclusions, duplicate complex logic, and patch together custom code just to keep things moving. And with 79% of customers expecting consistent interactions across departments, there’s too much room for error. 

This is what Salesforce Flow Automation solves by extending beyond just marketing journeys. Flow orchestrates internal workflows, cross-departmental experiences, and Agentforce interactions. And for existing customers who have pre-existing journeys in Journey Builder, you can bring those into any campaign in Marketing Cloud next with a couple clicks. No need to export or recreate anything.

Once inside Flow, marketers can design campaigns using quick start templates, real-time segments or event triggers — no more static lists or table imports. For example, in a re-engagement campaign a web activity-based event trigger can be set to initiate the journey, followed by a decision split that defines two paths: lapsed visitors and active browsers. 

• For lapsed visitors, the marketer may choose to re-engage using one of several existing journeys. Rather than selecting a single static journey for the entire group, Agentforce can dynamically assign the best-fit journey for each individual based on their profile and behavior.
• For active browsers, the goal could be a fast-follow conversion. Where this once required custom-coded daisy chaining, Flow enables it through a built-in action. Now, subscribers are automatically dropped into a high-performing follow-up journey optimized for email conversion.

All of this — journey orchestration, dynamic decisioning, and agentic personalization — is built and activated from a single workspace in Marketing Cloud Next, without switching tools or writing code. It’s not just campaign automation; it’s an intelligent, adaptive experience at scale.

Take your marketing to the next level

Agentic marketing is here—and it’s ready to 10x your team’s impact. Following these five steps will help you take full advantage of agentic marketing with Marketing Cloud Next. We’re excited for what’s possible in the years ahead.