by In a bold strategic move, Salesforce has announced the $8 billion acquisition of Informatica in 2025 — a deal that signals its shift toward agentic AI and large-scale enterprise data modernization. Completed at a 30% discount from Informatica’s previous valuation, the acquisition marks Salesforce’s renewed effort to reignite growth and strengthen its AI ecosystem amid slowing sales and intensifying competition in the SaaS market.
Industry experts see the acquisition as a potential catalyst for Salesforce’s AI transformation, giving the company access to Informatica’s deep expertise in data quality, integration, and delivery — the essential foundation of any scalable AI platform.
SaaS Meets Its Next Disruption: Agentic AI
For nearly two decades, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has defined cloud computing. Salesforce built its empire by offering CRM software that required no installation and operated on flexible subscription models.
However, the rapid emergence of agentic AI — autonomous digital agents that can interpret data, make decisions, and act independently — is reshaping this model. Analysts warn that as AI becomes more capable, traditional SaaS platforms could lose relevance. Businesses increasingly need AI-powered agents that go beyond dashboards and manual workflows to deliver insights and results automatically.
By acquiring Informatica, Salesforce is positioning itself to lead this transformation. It plans to integrate Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) into its Agentforce platform, the company’s flagship agentic AI initiative launched in 2024. This combination could significantly enhance Agentforce’s performance, improving data reliability and solving the long-standing “garbage in, garbage out” problem that limits many AI systems today.
Data: The Foundation of Intelligent AI
Behind every successful AI model lies a single critical ingredient — high-quality data. Without it, even the most sophisticated algorithms produce unreliable results.
According to Deutsche Bank analysts, Salesforce’s ability to succeed in AI will depend on the quality of the data pipelines it controls. “Without Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud, Salesforce’s AI capabilities would remain limited,” analysts noted in a recent investor report.
Most corporate data remains fragmented and messy — filled with duplicates, inconsistent formats, and outdated entries. As technology analyst Joseph Ours puts it, “No one truly has AI-ready data yet.”
This acquisition directly addresses that challenge. By combining Salesforce’s vast customer data capabilities with Informatica’s powerful data governance and cleaning tools, Salesforce can now ensure its AI systems are trained on accurate, secure, and trusted information.
When AI Improves Data, and Data Improves AI
Interestingly, Salesforce’s move also highlights a new reality: AI is both dependent on and essential for better data management.
According to George Johnston, Deloitte UK’s Data Risk and Analytics Lead, organizations face four main data challenges — volume, silos, legacy systems, and lack of expertise. The diversity of modern data formats, from emails to IoT sensor logs, makes maintaining consistency nearly impossible without automation.
That’s where Informatica’s IDMC platform excels. It uses machine learning to clean, classify, and merge data from multiple systems, automatically spotting inconsistencies and missing values. It can also secure sensitive information and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
Through this acquisition, Salesforce gains access to Informatica’s CLAIRE AI engine, which automates large parts of this process. CLAIRE perfectly complements Salesforce’s Agentforce vision — a future where AI manages the data that powers even smarter AI.
The Hidden Cost of Bad Data
AI “hallucinations” — false or misleading outputs — have become a growing concern in the age of generative AI. A 2024 industry survey found that 90% of data scientists encounter hallucinations in their models, and 93% report them at least weekly.
The cause often isn’t faulty algorithms but faulty data. Poor-quality inputs cause even the most advanced models to misinterpret information or make inaccurate predictions.
By acquiring Informatica, Salesforce aims to reduce this risk. Clean, well-governed data helps ensure that AI systems produce reliable and actionable outputs, increasing enterprise trust and reducing operational risk.
Agentforce: Salesforce’s AI Growth Engine
Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, launched in 2024, has already shown strong momentum. Within its first nine months, it attracted over 3,000 paying customers, generating around $900 million in AI-related revenue — nearly 3% of Salesforce’s total income.
Analysts believe Salesforce initially offered discounted pricing to attract early adopters. With Informatica now part of its ecosystem, the company plans to deliver higher-value, compliance-ready AI services that justify premium pricing.
This move also positions Salesforce to compete more directly with Microsoft, Oracle, and Google Cloud, which are racing to combine enterprise software with advanced AI automation.
The Bottom Line: Building the Future of Enterprise AI
Salesforce’s $8 billion Informatica acquisition could be its most transformative deal since acquiring Slack in 2021. By merging advanced data management with agentic AI, Salesforce is betting that the next generation of enterprise software won’t rely on static dashboards — but on autonomous AI agents powered by clean, intelligent data.
If Salesforce executes successfully, this deal could reignite its growth, strengthen its leadership in the enterprise AI race, and redefine how businesses manage and use data in the digital era.
In today’s economy, one truth stands out: data is the fuel that powers AI — and AI is the engine that refines it. With Informatica under its wing, Salesforce is now better equipped than ever to lead that transformation.
