Informatica’s integration into the Salesforce architecture has proceeded at pace since it was acquired by the customer relationship management software platform last year.
The extent of that transformation is being demonstrated in a worldwide Salesforce touring showcase. In the glitzy shows, the role of the artificial intelligence-powered data management specialist’s capabilities within Agentforce – Salesforce’s agentic AI platform – has taken centre stage.
Informatica is providing the crucial data quality and management services that are required to feed and maintain a fleet of agents that the American software giant has created to better enable clients to interact with their AI applications and tools. The company’s own agents have been retooled to interact with those of Agentforce, ensuring they are furnished with the most appropriate and accurate data for the use cases demanded upstream. That’s as well as providing the important quality, integration and metadata services that give trust to the data on which the agents work.“This brings together trusted data-connected systems and business context into a single foundation for AI,” said Greg Hanson, group vice president and head of EMEA North at Informatica. “That’s a big differentiator in respect of what Salesforce now has in its arsenal of capabilities around supporting AI with trusted context.”
Headless Processing
The closer integration of Informatica is on show at Salesforce’s latest world-straddling live marketing campaign, the Agentforce World Tour, at which the parent has been showing off the latest innovations and additions to its platform. The current crop of shows, which will have taken in cities including Sydney, Tokyo, London and Washington by spring of 2027, is focused on Salesforce’s “headless” agentic AI architecture.
The term refers to a user interface that has no front page and no dashboard. Instead, tasks, research and all other interactions within the platform are conducted through Agentforce, which then puts the AI agents to work in gathering the necessary information and executing the desired actions. AI agents can trigger actions, execute workflows and consume data without a human needing to log in or navigate a front end.
Informatica’s own headless agentic offering was put into operation for Salesforce’s 150,000 business customers in May and is being given its public airing at the current crop of shows.
Shared Capabilities
Informatica’s role within the multi-level agentic architecture that Salesforce has created is built on the company’s longstanding operations within financial services and other allied industries. Its expertise will be shared now among clients in the many other sectors that Salesforce serves.
Soon after the acquisition, Hanson told Data Management Insight that Informatica would be seized upon to enhance the parent company’s AI ambitions. It is working in conjunction with MuleSoft, the unified integration and API platform that Salesforce purchased in 2018, and Data 360, which is Salesforce’s real-time data platform and the core data foundation for Agentforce.
Hanson said the agents contain the combined expertise and capabilities that Informatica and Salesforce have accumulated over the past few decades to offer clients a powerful one-stop-shop of business intelligence capabilities fed by trusted data-driven AI capabilities.
“If you can think about how to orchestrate business processes, it’s all driven by data that gets exposed to those agents,” Hanson told Data Management Insight.
“You’ve got Informatica agents that… facilitate all the provision of data through those agents to whatever needs to consume it, be it a human or be it another agent.”
Increased Risks
Hanson said that the importance of trust in data has become more acute as agentic architectures have taken on more mission-critical and data-sensitive tasks.
When early agentic deployments had provided basic assistance via chatbots, the risks they posed to organisations’ operations were minimal. A wrongly delivered sales brochure was unlikely to cause operational breakdowns.
However, an erroneous credit assessment, an inaccurate portfolio report or an unverified price recommendation could not only be costly to a financial institution, it could be in breach of regulations and spark a reputationally damaging legal action.
The difficulty, he adds, is that there is a gulf between organisations’ perceptions of how well they understand their AI and their ability to use it adequately.
A recent survey commissioned by the company found that while a large majority of 600 business leaders questioned said they thought two-thirds of their employees trusted the outcomes of their AI use, almost all said their employees needed more training in AI literacy.
Informatica terms this the “trust paradox” and says it could compromise organisations’ operations.
With all parts of the Salesforce ecosystem working together, Hanson said he sees an opportunity to address the data trust paradox by ensuring customers are fully aware of the importance of their data. Many firms, he said, are running headlong into the new world of AI “with sunglasses on”, meaning they aren’t getting their data foundations right.
“There needs to be an investment in the data foundations,” he said. “And it needs to happen right now because the agentic use cases that are being adopted right now are really the key ones that leverage high net-value information.”
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