One of our favorite weeks of the year is spent in Chicago each June at Salesforce Connections. The energy in the rooms stood out (more on that later) but as you can imagine, AI was the clear focus across the more than 280 sessions during the two days of the conference.
And the message from Salesforce was clear: the shift from AI assistance to AI autonomy is no longer coming. It’s here. For our clients in commerce and marketing, here’s what stood out.
Agentic Commerce: Storefront Next is the Upgrade Merchants Have Been Waiting For
For years, enterprise merchants have faced an impossible trade-off: powerful commerce infrastructure that takes months and significant budget to build and maintain, or simpler storefronts that can’t scale. Salesforce’s new Storefront Next breaks that compromise.
It’s an AI-first storefront designed to deliver enterprise-grade capability (composable architecture, out-of-the-box speed, high conversion defaults) without the heavy developer lift. Teams can launch and iterate in a fraction of the time, which means they can actually respond to what customers are doing, not just what they did last quarter.
Paired with that, the broader Headless 360 vision is coming into sharper focus. Commerce, content, and data are being decoupled and reconnected through agents, so a single product idea can flow across every channel, audience, and language without the manual orchestration that’s always slowed teams down.
And Real-Time Offer Management is worth watching closely: the ability to deliver personalized, channel-optimized offers based on live customer behavior (centrally managed, agent-driven) is a genuine step change for promotional strategy.
Agentforce Marketing: Agents that Build Pipeline, Create Content, and Run Campaigns
The marketing announcements at Connections were equally bold.
Hunter (the new Prospecting Agent) autonomously identifies prospects, initiates outreach, and runs nurture sequences. Piper, Qualified’s AI SDR Agent, qualifies website visitors in real time through natural conversation, with no form fill and no dropped leads. Early results from Emplifi: 20% fewer lead-qualifying reps, 22% more opportunities created.
The Agentforce Marketing Goals Agent flips the model entirely. Instead of marketers managing campaign workflows, they set goals, guardrails, and budgets, and agents build, launch, and optimize from there. The new Agentforce Content Agent can generate full omnichannel campaign content (email, SMS, RCS, personalized promos) including localization, all in a single workflow.
The Contentful Acquisition
On the Contentful acquisition: this was strategic, not opportunistic.
Content has always been the noticeable gap in Salesforce’s platform. You had the data, you had the AI, you had the channels, but no native structured content layer to tie it all together. Contentful fills that hole in a way that creates real synergies across both commerce and marketing.
Think about what that unified content layer actually unlocks. On the commerce side, product descriptions, promotional content, and storefront experiences can now be assembled dynamically by agents based on who the shopper is, what channel they’re on, and what they’ve already done. On the marketing side, campaign content (email, SMS, RCS, personalized promos) gets generated and delivered from that same content foundation. Same source of truth, every touchpoint.
That shared layer is what makes the “create once, deliver everywhere” promise real. A marketer briefing the Agentforce Content Agent and a merchandiser configuring Storefront Next are now drawing from the same structured content, governed by the same brand guidelines, personalized through the same customer data in Data Cloud. No more siloed content teams building the same assets twice for different systems. No more inconsistent brand experiences because commerce and marketing were running on separate stacks.
The practical result: Agentforce agents can query, assemble, and deliver personalized experiences dynamically, without manual publishing steps, across every channel, in any language, in real time. It closes the loop between knowing what a customer needs and actually delivering the right content to them at the right moment, whether that’s a promotional email, a storefront hero, or an SMS offer triggered by something they just did.
It’s the difference between an AI that could personalize experiences and one that actually does.
The Vibe? Genuinely Optimistic
What struck us most wasn’t any single announcement. It was the mood on the floor. Marketers, commerce leaders, and practitioners weren’t stressed about AI disrupting their work. Instead, they were excited about it.
The narrative Salesforce is building (marketers as makers, freed from administrative drudgery to focus on strategy and creativity) clearly resonated. The Agentic Marketing Showdown, the packed workshops, the conversations over coffee: there was real enthusiasm about what’s possible and a sense that the tools are finally catching up to the ambition.
Once again, it was a big week in Chicago with lots of positive momentum to build on. Drop us a message if you want to talk through what any of this means for your roadmap.
