And that’s a wrap! Another Connections event has concluded – two days packed with discourse from technical experts and interviews with some of Salesforce’s key executives in the marketing and commerce spaces. What an insightful 48 hours it was!
Marketing Cloud Next was the main announcement at Connections ‘25, and while there will always be the ‘new shiny toys’ in Salesforce, this new iteration of Marketing Cloud is significant for several reasons. Not to mention that it’s the vision that Salesforce has been working on for years, coming to life.
So, beyond the hype, I personally have a few key thoughts about the technology and the themes surrounding it. Here are eight remarks that I believe are topical and thought-provoking.
1. The Great Convergence
Looking from the outside in, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud space has become crowded in the past couple of years. There are now five product offerings in circulation (MCE, MCAE, MCG, MCA), including the newly unveiled Marketing Cloud Next.
Salesforce emphasized that what’s happening here is not a migration, but a convergence. But what does this really mean, practically speaking? The idea is that existing Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE) customers get access to the supercharged ‘on core’ technology, while still using their existing editions in parallel. In short, Salesforce won’t force you to move over.
Admittedly, MCAE is more at feature parity with the ‘on core’ offerings. MCE is a ‘beast’, and so will be a heavier lift both in terms of matching up the underlying codebase and your in-house marketing operations. To aid the ‘convergence’, your previous investments into automation, segments created in Data Cloud, etc., can be reflected in Marketing Cloud Next.
Will we reach a point where all Marketing Cloud* customers use Marketing Cloud Next? No surprise that it will take many years before Marketing Cloud Next is the de facto Marketing Cloud edition – if ever.
(*referring to both Marketing Cloud Engagement/ExactTarget and Account Engagement/Pardot)
2. Consumption Credits and Cards
When Salesforce began shifting towards a credit-based consumption model, the questions on everyone’s minds were about consumption limits, guardrails, and cost.
In terms of credit in Marketing Cloud Next, you’ll find sources of consumption, such as messaging (email, SMS, and WhatsApp sends), segmentations and activations (in Data Cloud), and others.
While I commend Salesforce’s Digital Wallet for improving transparency around spent and remaining credits, there still remain question marks around credit consumption across the whole business. For example, what if the sales team consumes a disproportionate amount of credits that marketing had earmarked for their campaigns, and extra credits are out of the question due to budget?
3. Data Quality
I don’t want to sound like a party-pooper, but data quality is a topic that we can’t simply sweep under the rug. The demos at Salesforce conferences, Connections included, are so impressive. However, it would be naive to think that you can simply go back to your desk and flick a switch for this to all work magically.
AI requires complete and clean data (think ‘garbage in, garbage out’). The quality of data is something that can easily spiral out of control, and once ‘the cat is out of the bag’, it’s an uphill battle to regain control. In my consulting experience, every organization had a data quality problem – moreover, it’s rarely an initiative that people jump to enthusiastically help fix.
While there are multiple third-party data quality tools (deduplication, standardization, classification), in truth, it all starts with marketers understanding their data. It’s not solely the responsibility of the admin. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again – data quality is the responsibility of everyone who interacts with it.
4. Opportunity Lifecycle Deep Personalization
Bringing Marketing Cloud onto the core platform opens up so many possibilities to support both B2B and B2C use cases from one edition.
Perhaps one overlooked bonus is the chance to tightly align marketing interactions with the opportunity lifecycle. For those of us who worked with Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), you will know all too well the limitations of working with opportunity data.
While basic triggers were possible (for example, sending an email when the opportunity status changes to X), reaching deeper into record data in real-time wasn’t as easily achievable.
Running on the same infrastructure, minus relying on connectors to sync from one codebase to another, engaging with prospective and existing customers based on opportunities is both faster and smarter.
5. The Future of APIs
When designing Data Cloud, Salesforce strived to keep it as an open gateway – in other words, organizations can connect with any data source in their tech stack. On top of this, zero-copy means that data doesn’t have to be ported and stored in the Salesforce platform, yet can be referenced from the data source as if it were actually stored on the Salesforce platform. The result? Speed, less computing power consumed, and all-around better data integrity.
Where does this leave integration? Building APIs between MCE/MCAE has been a well-respected skill since time began; however, perhaps the need for APIs will dwindle in light of Data Cloud.
Note that all organizations should begin adopting a Data Cloud-first mentality to segmentation. Whether you’re using the ‘on core’ Marketing Cloud editions or not, all data ingestion and segmentation should be done through Data Cloud. Not only is this a single segmentation method (vs. MCE’s multitude of ways to segment) and more sophisticated, it’s guaranteed to future-proof your implementation.
6. Extinct Skills?
Following on from my remark about demand for API integrations decreasing, could other skills become less in demand – or even become extinct?
Working in technology, one has to be prepared for – and accept – change. We are likely to see other examples in the coming years, so it’s best to truly double down on upskilling on Data Cloud, which underlies not only Marketing Cloud ‘on core’ but all other products in the Salesforce portfolio.
7. Democratizing ‘Luxury’ Commerce
Shopping boils down to branding, product, and customer experience. With Agentforce, Commerce Cloud is bringing a level of personalization to the customer experience that once was the reserve of ‘luxury’ brands.
Retailers can have Agentforce delve into a wealth of customer profile data, even picking up on subtle intent data, and also have a rich understanding of the product catalogue to respond to natural language questions.
8. Feeding Commerce Agents
With most Agentforce use cases, agents learn from and are informed by customer data – whether that’s demographic or behavioral. The point I’m trying to make is that this data is submitted by/gleaned from customers.
For Agentforce to work effectively with Commerce Cloud, agents need to be fed with rich product data. This needs to be both descriptive and contextual in order for an agent to generate good quality responses – by this, we can think of tagging products with an array of synonyms.
So, how would an organization go about bulking out the product catalogue to this extent, especially in fast-changing/seasonal product catalogs? Salesforce does have a built-in Product Description generator, yet exploring third-party solutions on the market, such as Lily.ai, is a smart move to see what’s possible – and what it takes to achieve agentic commerce.
Summary
Connections ‘25 was an incredible experience that was fun and thought-provoking. Beyond the hype, there are always thoughts running through my mind about the technology and the themes surrounding it, and I hope you also found these remarks interesting.
Marketing Cloud ‘on core’ will be an interesting one to watch unfold over the next year and beyond.
