Salesforce Connections (CNX) 2025, held on June 11-12 in Chicago, gathered worldwide marketers, commerce leaders, and technologists to explore and discuss the future of AI-driven marketing, commerce, and customer experiences. The conference was about Salesforce’s vision of agentic marketing and autonomous customer engagement, rewriting the script on AI’s role in driving business growth.
Ranosys, as a 3X award-winning Salesforce Summit Partner, observed sessions closely, and in this resource, we are sharing the key highlights of the event.
Day 1: The Autonomous Marketing Revolution
Salesforce Connections 2025 kicked off with visionary sessions that introduced Agentforce and the concept of agentic marketing, setting a transformative tone for the conference.
Key Highlights:
1. Main Keynote: Marketing is Now Autonomous
Speaker: Ariel Kelman, President & CMO, Salesforce
The opening keynote established Salesforce’s bold vision that “Marketing is now autonomous.” Ariel Kelman introduced Agentforce, Salesforce’s flagship AI agent platform, redefining marketing execution and optimization:
- Agentforce Platform Unveiling: Demonstrated AI agents executing, optimising, and customising customer experiences end-to-end, without human intervention.
- Live Demonstrations: Showcased real-time retargeting, dynamic content modifications, 24/7 lead capture, and automated ad spend reallocation to maximise ROI.
- Two-Way Conversation Framework: Emphasised transforming static marketing into interactive AI-powered conversations, where emails and ads become two-way engagements.
- Atlas Reasoning Engine: Introduced as Agentforce’s “brainstem,” enabling multi-step, goal-directed cognition by processing structured and unstructured data for planning, evaluation, and refinement.
- Ford Pro Example: Demonstrated customers ordering vehicles via AI-powered email conversations, eliminating forms and dealership visits – a true example of agentic marketing at scale.
2. Bold Moves & Building Brands
Speaker: Bozoma Saint John, Former CMO of Netflix, Uber, and Apple
Bozoma urged marketers to:
- Build an authentic and culturally relevant brand that connects with audiences deeply and resonates with their emotions.
- Take risks instead of playing it safe to stand out in a competitive and AI-driven world
- Remember that human connection is the most effective form of marketing for impactful branding, even in AI-driven automation.
Day 2: Product Innovation and Unified Commerce
Day 2 focused on practical implementation, product launches, and deep technical insights, showcasing how Salesforce is enabling agentic marketing and unified commerce at scale.
Key Highlights:
1. Marketing Cloud Keynote: Next Gen Marketing Cloud
Speaker: Stephen Hammond, EVP & GM, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce
The keynote titled “Next Gen Marketing Cloud: Built for Agentic Marketers” introduced Marketing Cloud Next, representing the biggest product transformation at CNX 2025:
- AI-Assisted Campaign Creation via Agentforce: Campaigns that used to take weeks to build now take hours, with the AI agents coming up with a campaign brief, building audiences, drafting email/SMS content, and building the journey in Flow.
- Flow-Based Orchestration: Replaces the old Journey Builder with flexible and dynamic workflows for omnichannel engagements.
- Deep Data Cloud Integration: Hyper-personalizes real-time segmentation and activation of customer data.
- End of “Do-Not-Reply” Marketing: AI agents transform what basically used to be one-sided messages into two-way conversations, wherein they now even track responses and escalate issues to a human when necessary.
- Unstructured Data Activation: Activates unstructured data from Google Drive, SharePoint, Zendesk, blogs, and documents to drive campaign personalization.
- Roadmap Sneak Peeks: Garnered strategic insight into upcoming Marketing Cloud innovations for future planning.
2. Commerce Cloud Keynote: Unified Retail Innovation
Speaker: Nitin Mangtani, SVP/GM, Commerce Cloud, Salesforce
The keynote laid out Salesforce’s vision for Unified Commerce, addressing retailer complexity, hence offering simplified, yet powerful, solutions:
- Unified Retail Bundles:
- Unified Digital Bundle: Includes Digital Commerce, Order Management, POS, Marketing Cloud Advanced, Salesforce Foundations, Data Cloud Credits, and Agentforce Credits.
- Unified Retail Bundle: Adds Service Cloud, Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft, and Loyalty Management for enterprise retailers.
- Agentforce for guided shopping: New AI skills for autonomous product discovery and checkout assistance.
- The Enhanced Composable Storefront: Developer tooling updates, real-time personalisation triggers via Data Cloud, and native hybrid authentication.
- Digital Subscriptions Integration: Improvements in B2B Commerce with Revenue Cloud bundles and buyer group extensibility for custom pricing and promotions.
- Point Of Sale Revolution: Modern POS with computer vision, cloud inventory management, and endless aisle concepts to get rid of inventory constraints.
- The Full Retail Framework: Seamless demonstration of integration across digital and physical touchpoints powered by unified data and AI for consistent personalised experiences.
3. From Kickflips to Culture Shifts
Speaker: Tony Hawk, Skateboarding Legend
Tony Hawk shared timeless branding lessons:
- Authenticity and risk-taking are essential to building brands that last.
- Personal branding principles – staying true to values and taking calculated risks – are equally relevant for corporate marketing.
4. Deep Dive Sessions: Data + CRM Integration
Sessions explored:
- How integrating real-time customer data enables businesses to build hyper-personalised journeys that adapt instantly to changing customer behaviours, preferences, and intent signals. This ensures that marketing communications remain relevant and impactful at every touchpoint.
- How combining Salesforce Customer 360 with Agentforce creates a powerful synergy. Customer 360 aggregates all customer data into a unified profile, while Agentforce leverages this data to deliver contextual insights, make AI-powered recommendations, and execute entire campaigns autonomously. The result is hands-free campaign execution where AI agents can personalise content, offers, and engagement strategies in real time, driving higher conversion and loyalty rates.
Summer ’25 Release Highlights
Key announcements included:
- Agentforce Enhancements: For employee use cases, multimodal support, web search integration, and enhanced instruction adherence.
- Industry-Specific Skills: New Agentforce capabilities for Education, Financial Services, Life Sciences, and Public Sector.
- Financial Performance: Salesforce’s Data Cloud and AI suite surpassed $1 billion run-rate revenue, with 120% YoY growth and 3,000 net-new Agentforce deals in Q4.
Conclusion
- Marketing goes autonomous with Agentforce, enabling the AI agents to plan, execute, and optimise customer experiences without human intervention.
- Campaign management is transformed in Marketing Cloud Next, and campaigns are created faster thanks to AI-assisted workflows and deeper Data Cloud integrations for real-time personalisation.
- Commerce Cloud innovations introduce Unified Retail Bundles, improved storefront experience and capabilities, AI-powered guided shopping, and modernized POS to make retail operations smoother.
- Authenticity remains crucial, as Bozoma Saint John and Tony Hawk emphasise, reminding all those brands to remain human-centric through these AI advancements.
- Financial growth puts this AI-first strategy into perspective, with Data Cloud and AI suite revenue from Salesforce going over the $1 billion on a run-rate.
- Overall, Salesforce CNX 2025 voiced the vision of how AI, unified data, and authentic branding will bring in marketing and commerce success.
As a 3X award-winning Salesforce Summit Partner, Ranosys gained firsthand insights from CNX 2025. Our team of Salesforce experts can help you leverage these innovations to elevate your marketing, commerce, and customer experience strategies.
