Salesforce Marketing Cloud
by Paul Shefferd •
At Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce shared a ream of updates that will impact the way in which existing and prospective customers of Salesforce’s suite of marketing products use their platforms. In this blog, our Business Solutions Team Lead, Paul Shefferd, breaks down the announcements and updates around Agentforce Marketing (the product now formerly known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud!)
If you're keen to hear about some of the other updates from Dreamforce, head over to Paul's summary blog here.
In this blog, I’ve compiled the key announcements and updates on Agentforce Marketing – the new name for the suite of products formerly called Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
The new umbrella term of Agentforce Marketing covers a lot of old and new technologies, so we’ve put together a quick reference guide here for the terms and product names that sit within the new hierarchy:
Agentforce Marketing technically refers to the new agentic capabilities that are going to become available in these platforms, but as you can see, it covers the products formally known as Pardot (now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) and what we used to call Marketing Cloud (now Marketing Cloud Engagement).
Agentforce Marketing also covers the new generation of Marketing Automation in the Salesforce ecosystem, Marketing Cloud Next, which itself is an umbrella term for Marketing Cloud Growth/Advanced (Marketing Automation), Salesforce Intelligence (Analytics) and Salesforce Personalization (Real-Time Web Personalisation).
Before I talk about the announcements within Agentforce Marketing, it’s very important to explain that Data 360, Agentforce, and Marketing Cloud Next are all available to existing Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE) and Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) customers at no extra cost! You read that correctly, the next generation of platforms and features are available within the cost of your licensing, you may just need to talk to your Account Executive at Salesforce to get features enabled.
The key updates announced within Agentforce Marketing were…
Salesforce have called this the ‘end of no-reply marketing’. Agents can monitor customer responses on your email and mobile channels and can conversationally handle responses. For example, if you send an invite to an event, they could reply to your email asking for more information and your agents can handle their requests. All this engagement can be fed back into Data 360 and CRM!
Powered by Salesforce Personalization, this feature allows a website-embedded chat bot to pull information from across your website and display it to a customer upon request, even being able to provide product comparisons or use a recommendation strategy powered by your Data 360 data – such as previous purchases!
For existing Marketing Cloud Engagement customers, this new update has significantly expanded the data that is shared between Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Next. These new changes are significant as they will allow users to run their existing Marketing Cloud Engagement platforms whilst they explore and trial the next generation platform. This prevents the need for a ‘migration’ to the new platforms and instead facilitates a gradual transition that suits your business needs and timeline.
In line with what we saw across the rest of the keynotes, marketing platforms (particularly Marketing Cloud Next) are being outfitted with pre-build Agentforce agents. The particularly exciting example is the Campaign Creation Agent, that can produce you a whole Marketing Cloud Next campaign, content and send flow in minutes, using just natural language prompting.
These changes, as expected, are all very focused on making the new Marketing Automation platforms more accessible, easier to use, and more exciting. It’s clear that Salesforce are keen to get as many customers over to the new platform as possible, although they are clearly anticipating many people taking some time to transition over from Marketing Cloud Engagement due to the complexity of implementation that the platform typically has.
Don’t panic! There are no immediate plans to scrap either MCAE or MCE but at some point, these new platforms are going to be a lot better than the current ones and Salesforce are setting up to make that transition as easy as possible.
Agentforce just got much, much easier to get started with, and pre-built agents will add value to any organisation from day one. For organisations with more complex needs, configuring new custom agents is now much easier, and more robust.
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!