Salesforce Buys Informatica to Build an AI That Actually Knows What It’s Talking About
Salesforce just spent $8B to make its AI agents slightly less clueless — with Informatica’s help.
In a move that’s part data consolidation, part AI arms race, and part “we swear this makes sense on a whiteboard,” Salesforce is acquiring Informatica for $8 billion. Why? Because AI agents need context, metadata, governance, and 14 other buzzwords before they can do something smarter than recommending socks with your CRM.
Marc Benioff calls it the foundation for “agentic AI” — which we assume means your CRM will soon generate passive-aggressive Slack messages with emotional intelligence and a unified data model.
With Informatica’s capabilities in data quality, lineage, and privacy — and Salesforce’s obsession with rebranding the same three products every fiscal year — the plan is to fuse everything into Agentforce™, a sentient data blob that promises to understand your spreadsheets, not just look at them.
According to Salesforce, this acquisition is about “data transparency,” “context-rich insights,” and making sure your Tableau charts have feelings. Also, yes, this will be good for public sector, life sciences, and whatever industry buys a lot of Gartner reports.
If nothing else, Informatica’s metadata catalog will give AI agents enough backstory to get cast in a Marvel origin series.
