On 27 May, Salesforce announced an $8bn agreement to acquire cloud data management company Informatica. Salesforce’s rationale for the deal is to make the company more competitive in the rapidly growing agentic AI market.

Informatica offers Salesforce a more comprehensive data management solution to enhance its own, which is largely focused on apps and its new agentic AI solutions.

In the wider market, the acquisition highlights a growing competitive field of rival agentic AI tools providers including Microsoft Copilot Agent, IBM watsonx Agents, Google Vertex AI Agents, and Oracle AI Agents, among others, which need to hone their own strategies for improving data management to enable continued and effective AI development.

Companies are facing increasing pressure to deploy AI agents to maintain a competitive edge. But Salesforce’s own research found that nearly half (48%) of IT leaders have concerns that their company’s data foundation isn’t ready, and 55% lack confidence in implementing AI with appropriate guardrails.

GlobalData research director, Charlotte Dunlap, notes that in recent months, in an effort to remain competitive, Salesforce has turned its attention towards agentic AI capabilities with its Agentforce offering, designed to enhance its developer platforms and business applications.

And preceding the Informatica deal, on 15 May, Salesforce announce a definitive agreement to acquire AI agent company Convergence.ai to strengthen its Agentforce strategy.

“AI has elevated the importance of data management in providing the contextual perspective that’s critical for agentic AI applications, because they work autonomously with minimal human oversight,” said Dunlap.

Agentforce was released in October 2024 putting Salesforce in the running to capture a greater share of the agentic AI market, which is developing at breakneck speed. GlobalData predicts that the overall AI market will see a 35% increase in 2025 over 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 41% from 2023 to 2028. The agentic AI segment is expected to play a critical role in this growth.

Salesforce intends to integrate Informatica’s technology across its platform, embedding its data tools within the Agentforce AI stack and the data cloud pipeline.

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud offers customers solutions for data cataloguing, data integration from various sources, governance, privacy, metadata management, and master data management.

“Informatica will provide broader integration of data sources including non-Salesforce systems. This ensures the quality and management of the data being collected from a variety of sources used to build and train AI models,” said Dunlap.

On the deal rationale being a market competitiveness strategy, AI data visualisation platform Qlik CEO Mike Capone, said: “Salesforce has a long track record of pulling customers deeper into its tightly controlled ecosystem, where bundling is the norm, licensing is rigid, and integration with non-Salesforce systems becomes increasingly painful.”

“If you’re not all-in on Salesforce, you’re now on the outside of a very expensive walled garden. Instead of the flexibility they need, customers should brace for surprise costs and a roadmap designed to serve Salesforce-first use cases.”

According to Andy MacMillan, CEO at data analytics platform Alteryx, wider market implications of the acquisition include the growing importance of accurate data as agentic AI becomes more widely adopted. “However, the approach appears more traditional and IT-centric, an interesting contrast for Salesforce, a company known for enabling business users,” he said.

“Business users and analysts are increasingly looking for no-code, drag-and-drop tools that allow them to apply domain expertise, and work with data across systems, using LLMs to build agents that deliver meaningful outcomes.

“But just as importantly, integrating AI with enterprise data requires a governance model that involves not only IT, but also legal, compliance, privacy, and security teams.