Dreamforce 2025: The Highlights

A review of the key announcements and updates for Salesforce Marketing Cloud customers from Dreamforce 2025, by Business Solutions Team Lead and certified Marketing Cloud Engagement Developer and Data 360 Consultant, Paul Shefferd. 

Introduction

It’s been a few weeks since Dreamforce 2025, and as usual this year’s edition was jam-packed with new announcements. Agentforce was (unsurprisingly) the main focus for the event, but there was a real wealth of new features and updates announced that will have flown under the radar for a lot of people that didn’t want to spend days combing through the hundreds of recorded keynotes, workshops, roundtables and fireside chats.

Fortunately for those individuals, I watched as many of these sessions as I could so that they don’t have to, and true to Clevertouch’s core tenets of Simplify, Connect and Inform, I’m going to try and distil down three days of content into this blog. Here goes!

Name Changes

Not revolutionary, but this one is useful for many that struggle to keep up with the changing names of Salesforce products – and if you’re someone that reads a lot of documentation and release notes, this will help you decipher between the different platform updates.

Salesforce have dropped the ‘cloud’ moniker from most of their products in favour of a new ‘Agentforce’ prefix. Consequently, Sales Cloud has become Agentforce Sales, Service Cloud has become Agentforce Service, and Marketing Cloud has become Agenforce Marketing (sort of, you can read more on this in our separate blog on the changes to Agentforce Marketing which will be published soon).

The only major products that have escaped the Agentforce rebrand (for now) are Data Cloud (now Data 360) and Tableau. 

Data 360

Data 360’s new name represents how important it has become to Salesforce and its future plans. The ultimate marketing integration tool, Data 360 allows enterprises to connect their data from across their technology stack and unify this into a single data model. Unifying this data has two benefits:

1. For marketers, they can personalise content and segment audiences using data that was previously siloed and unavailable.
   
2. Agentforce agents can act with greater business context and information, meaning their outputs and actions are more immediately useful and impactful.

Data 360’s importance has been reflected in the volume of changes it has seen this year, and this continued at Dreamforce with the announcement of some new features such as:

• Enhanced Ingestion and Storage of Unstructured Data: Allowing for ingestion and processing of PDFs and other documentation. This allows agents to actually understand and reference the material within the documents you provide it, rather than just having to direct people to documentation for them to read.
  
• Automated Data Governance: To protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data and sensitive information, data can be masked to Data 360 users who don’t need to see it. This process can be automated using policies, so admins can rest easy knowing that their data is always being protected.
  
• Free Data Ingestion for CRM Data: Data 360 users are now able to ingest their Salesforce CRM data into their data model for free! Organisations wanting to try Data 360 are now able to trial usage with your core platform data without incurring ingestion costs. This will help teams establish clear uses cases that are grounded in your core enterprise data!
  
• Agentforce Expansion: Data 360 will see a host of pre-built agents arriving between now and February 2026. Key amongst these will be the Modelling Agent, that automates the mapping of your data streams into your data model – field-by-field manual mapping will soon be thing of the past.

Data 360 credits were also halved in price earlier this year, meaning we’ve seen a reduction in both starting and maintenance costs. Coupled with the improved functionality and the ease of access that agents will soon provide, Data 360 suddenly seems like a really viable solution for the data challenges that have plagued marketing and CRM teams for years!

Agentforce

It wouldn’t have been a Salesforce event without a serious amount of Agentforce announcements, so it was no surprise to see it feature so heavily in every keynote.

In a nutshell, Agentforce is Salesforce’s AI agent platform that enables organisations to build and deploy AI agents within Agentforce products that perform tasks to ultimately enhance customer experiences.

It’s impossible to overstate the prevalence of Agentforce in every Salesforce technology, and it will continue to become more apparent as the primary focus of development for Salesforce. To pick out some of the key highlights for marketers that were announced at Dreamforce:

• New Agent Builder: The creation process for agents just got a lot easier, with many more natural language options to produce more robust and reliable agents.
  
• AgentScript: One of the most exciting announcements at Dreamforce for anyone exploring Agentforce, AgentScript is a coding language that ensures agent reasoning and outputs are consistent and within guardrails. No more overlapping written prompts for your agents – AgentScript provides code-based robustness to your instructions. The best part? You can ask the new Agent Builder to turn any written natural language instructions into AgentScript for you!
  
• Simulation Mode: A big challenge for debugging agents has been that the reasoning engine has been an opaque ‘black box’ that takes an input and returns an output, but provides no insight into the logic that connected the two. The new simulation mode will provide insight into the steps the agent has worked through in order to reach its output. This will make auditing and improving agents much quicker and easier!
  
• Included with Agentforce Marketing: More good news for organisations that are thinking about exploring Agentforce – existing Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Engagement customers can now access Agentforce at no added cost. It should be as simple as asking your account executive to get it enabled for your org.
  
• Universal Use Cases: Across the three days at Dreamforce, there were a huge amount of pre-built Agents announced that will provide benefit to every user of the respective platforms. My personal favourite is Agentforce Setup, which gives you an agent to help your admins manage permissions, flows, objects, fields and other mundane tasks in a fraction of the time!

In Summary

The theme really could be summarised as ‘Lowering the Bar’, with the new releases providing pre-configured value instantly, and the process to create effective custom agents just got significantly easier and more reliable. Couple these changes with the release of the Flex Credit payment system in August (which slashed Agentforce running costs by ~80% for most users), and it suddenly feels like we’re not future-scaping anymore – Agentforce is a viable option for most enterprises now.

Data 360 is going to be a pivotal technology moving forwards, and Salesforce anticipate their entire client base utilising the tool at some undefined point in the future. They are taking significant steps to make it more cost effective, easier to configure and use, and more effective at an enterprise level.

There is little to get excited about for users of the current generation of Marketing Automation tools, but the next generation is developing quickly and you are able to start testing all of these products within the existing cost of your license.

Agentforce Marketing Consultancy

If you’d like more information on any of these updates, or you’d like to discuss how they may be positioned to solve your specific business requirements, then get in touch – we’re on-hand to help!