Salesforce’s Agentic Future: Acquisitions, Earnings and Dreamforce 2025

Salesforce has always been at the centre of enterprise software innovation, and 2025 is shaping up to be another defining year. From its recent acquisition spree, to investor tensions around earnings, to the excitement building toward Dreamforce, the threads all point to one thing: Salesforce continues to build on the foundations for the agentic enterprise, where humans and AI agents collaborate seamlessly, powered by trusted data.

Let’s break down what we’re seeing.

In the span of just a few months, Salesforce has gone on a buying spree, snapping up companies that each bring a key building block to its future vision:

• Informatica: trusted data governance and MDM for enterprise-scale AI
• Waii: natural language-to-SQL for easier access to data
• Regrello: agentic process automation at scale
• Bluebirds: AI prospecting to boost sales productivity
• Convergence AI: enabling AI agents to perform complex, human-like tasks

Put these together, and the strategy is clear. Salesforce is building a stack where:

• Data is trusted (via governance and quality tools like Informatica)
• Workflows are orchestrated (through automation and process intelligence)
• Execution is intelligent (with AI agents handling tasks that once required people)

For anyone in the ecosystem, the direction is unmistakable: Salesforce is now about humans and AI working side by side, with the platform as the conductor.

That’s where solutions like Vinton fit in. It provides the foundational conversational data layer that feeds into Salesforce, ready to fuel Data Cloud, Agentforce, and the next generation of insights. It’s about activating knowledge from conversations across the enterprise.

Of course, Wall Street doesn’t always reward foundation-building. Salesforce’s most recent quarterly earnings were a perfect example.

On paper, the numbers looked good: Q2 revenue of $10.2B, up 10% year-over-year, slightly beating estimates, and guidance pointing to a record FY26. But markets reacted harshly — shares dipped nearly 5% on the day, and Salesforce stock is still down ~23% YTD.

Why the disconnect? Analysts pointed to cautious forward guidance, slowing growth in the core Sales and Service Clouds, and the lack of visible monetisation from Salesforce’s much-hyped AI initiatives. As one put it, “We’re just playing a relative game, where everyone else on a relative basis is way better.”

But here’s the irony: Salesforce is already doing the hard work. Agentforce, Data Cloud, and the recent acquisitions are setting the stage for long-term transformation. The tension is between what investors want (growth today) and what customers want (stability, innovation, trust).

Marc Benioff and team seem to be betting that laying a strong foundation now will pay dividends later. FY26 could well be the inflection point where Wall Street catches up with Salesforce’s enterprise customers.

And then there’s Dreamforce. Always part product showcase, part cultural event, Dreamforce 2025 is shaping up to be the stage where Salesforce fully unveils its vision of the agentic enterprise.

Here are some of the biggest expectations and predictions making the rounds:

• Agentforce at Scale: If 2024 was all about pilots, 2025 is about real deployments. Will we see case studies from DirecTV, Reddit, Under Armour, Pandora, the US Army? All were mentioned in the earnings call.
• Agentic IT Service Management: Could Salesforce challenge ServiceNow in ITSM?
• Hybrid Teams: Humans and AI agents working together. This will be controversial, especially given recent layoffs in Salesforce’s support division, but real use cases are expected on stage.
• Star-Powered Lineup: Sundar Pichai (Google), Tekedra Mawakana (Waymo), Brian Niccol (Starbucks), and Andrew Ng (DeepLearning.ai) join the usual roster of Hollywood names.
• Dreamfest: A choice of two concerts – Metallica or Benson Boone – for another legendary night of music.

Taken together, Salesforce’s acquisitions, its balancing act in the public markets, and the expectations for Dreamforce all point in the same direction: the agentic enterprise isn’t a buzzword, it’s a strategy.

Salesforce is acquiring the missing puzzle pieces. It’s willing to endure short-term investor scepticism to build long-term value. And at Dreamforce, it will aim to show the world that the age of pilot projects is over — the age of scaled AI agents has begun.

The real question is whether customers, partners, and investors are ready to embrace this vision as quickly as Salesforce is building it.

One thing’s for sure: the next year in the Salesforce ecosystem will be anything but boring.