01 Main keynote: Salesforce opens the CRM to any AI tool
02 Data 360: agents are only as good as the context they get
03 Marketing Cloud keynote: brands now need to show up in AI's answers
The headline was AIforce, which makes Salesforce data, workflows, and permissions available from any AI interface. It launches with Claudeforce (Salesforce inside Claude), Slackforce (inside Slack), and Agentforce Coworker, built to work alongside people inside Lightning. Claudeforce is now in open beta: a sales rep can ask Claude for an update on their deals and then update those deals in Sales Cloud without opening the app. Salesforce also showed Koa, its specialized CRM model built on NVIDIA Nemotron, and seven ready-made agents for jobs like inbound leads, customer service, and supply chain.
Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, President and CTO of Engineering at Salesforce, shared the stage with Amanda Bailey and Abhishek Nandi from Lowe's to show how Data 360 is moving from a customer data platform to the context layer any authorized agent can draw on, whether it runs in Agentforce, Claude, or Gemini. The team demoed the Agent Context Engine live, pulling only the data relevant to each request, ahead of its general availability in December 2026. Around it sits what Salesforce calls the Enterprise AI Harness, where Informatica gets data ready, Data 360 turns it into context, and Tableau defines what terms like "revenue" mean. The idea running through the session was that agents are only as good as the context they get, and that context lives in data many companies are still organizing.
The Marketing keynote brought Salesforce product leaders, including Eric Zenz, SVP and GM of Marketing Cloud, together with speakers from Contentful, Sercante, and Formula One Management, and much of it centered on AI search. Customers now ask AI about a category before they visit a brand's website, so brands need to show up correctly in AI answers as well as in Google. Palmata, an answer engine optimization tool that comes from the Contentful and Marketing Cloud integration, shows how a brand appears in those answers, compares it with competitors, and recommends what content to improve. The keynote also introduced Campaign Agent and an inbound pipeline generation agent, which take on campaign creation, content personalization, and lead engagement, and Salesforce pointed to a 2x increase in conversion rates. Headless Marketing opens Marketing Cloud to any AI assistant through MCP. Underneath it all, the marketer's role is shifting toward setting the objective, the strategy, and the limits, while the system handles execution.
Formula 1, which has Salesforce as its Official Fan Companion Agent, showed what this looks like with real fans. Its fan data used to be spread across several systems, which made it hard to get insights and personalize outreach. With that data unified, the team now segments fans in real time by their interests and behavior and sends each one tailored content on every channel, and the result has been a 22% higher click-through rate.
