Event
by Brenda Michel

Salesforce Connections 2025 recap: Key trends & insights

Service

Salesforce Data and AI

Industry

Each year, thousands of professionals from around the world gather in Chicago for Salesforce Connections, a premier event focused on marketing, digital commerce, and customer experience. More than just a conference, Connections is where technology meets creativity, offering a deep dive into Salesforce’s latest innovations and real-world strategies to enhance how brands connect with their audiences.

The 2025 edition welcomed over 8,000 attendees and placed a strong spotlight on artificial intelligence and its growing role in transforming customer experience. At Nearsure, we had the opportunity to attend firsthand, explore the latest trends, connect with industry leaders, and discover new ways to bring even more value to our clients.

In this article, we’ll cover key announcements, standout sessions, major takeaways from the event, and share how we at Nortal are applying these insights. Let’s dive in!

Top sessions that stood out

Connections 2025 featured over fifty sessions packed with insights on the future of marketing, AI, and customer engagement. From that wide range, we’ve selected three that stood out most for their innovation, practical value, and alignment with our work at Nortal.

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01 Connections 2025 Main Keynote - Ariel Kelman, President & CMO, Salesforce
02 Marketing Cloud Keynote: Unlock Agentic Marketing Today – Stephen Hammond, EVP & GM, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce
03 Unleash the Digital Labor Platform, Agentforce for Marketing - Martin Kihn, SVP, Product Strategy, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce

The opening keynote, led by Ariel Kelman, set the tone for the entire event with the focus on Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI-powered framework designed to transform how businesses connect with their customers across marketing, sales, and service.

This vision marks a clear shift from traditional, one-way communication to real-time, two-way conversations. No more “do not reply” emails. Instead, brands will engage in dynamic, contextual dialogues that feel personal and human. This is the essence of Agentic Marketing: a new paradigm where AI doesn’t replace marketers; it elevates them, acting as a strategic and creative partner.

A standout element of Agentforce is its accessibility. The platform empowers anyone, regardless of technical background, to build, test, and deploy AI agents using Salesforce-native tools, making advanced AI capabilities accessible to a broader range of users.

Another key theme was trust and transparency. Agentforce was built to provide full visibility into how decisions are made, allowing teams to maintain control while building deeper, more trustworthy customer relationships.

This keynote inspired us and validated our vision to build faster, more human-centered, and personalized experiences for our clients, driving scalability, efficiency, and lasting impact.

This keynote highlighted how Agentic Marketing comes to life through data, focusing on how real-time personalization and dynamic engagement are powered by Salesforce’s Data Cloud.

One major announcement was Marketing Cloud Next, an upgraded, all-in-one platform with Data Cloud natively integrated. It enables teams to target the right audiences, track ROI, and optimize campaigns in real time. One of its biggest advantages? It enhances your existing Salesforce stack with additive innovation, not replacement.

With General Availability (GA) set for October 2025, Stephen Hammond outlined a clear five-step roadmap to start leveraging its full potential:

  1. Connect your data to Data Cloud for a unified customer view.
  2. Personalize experiences with Agentforce, delivering real-time, adaptive journeys across all channels.
  3. Unify loyalty promotions to strengthen retention. While 43% of customers leave after a single bad experience, a well-executed loyalty program can retain up to 72%.
  4. Manage offers and rewards via a centralized Digital Wallet.
  5. Embed customer journeys into Flow for smarter, automated orchestration.

To further empower marketing teams, this session also highlighted Marketing Intelligence, a solution within Marketing Cloud that offers end-to-end visibility into campaign performance, ad spend, KPIs, and ROI. With this level of insight, marketers can make faster, more confident decisions and build stronger, smarter relationships with their customers.

At Nortal, we see Marketing Cloud Next as a key accelerator. We’re aligning our delivery and strategy teams so our clients can adopt the platform from day one, seamlessly and with measurable business impact.

"If you can describe it, Salesforce can do it"
Martin Kihn | SVP, Product Strategy, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce

 

Martin Kihn took us deeper into what he calls the AI agent revolution.

Agentforce is evolving into a true digital labor platform, enabling teams to offload repetitive tasks to smart, autonomous agents. These aren’t just automated workflows; they’re AI-powered collaborators capable of personalizing scale and delivering conversational, human-like experiences across all touchpoints.

One of the session’s most compelling insights was that 75% of AI’s value lies in front-office functions like sales, marketing, service, and commerce. Agentforce supports use cases across nearly every business area, handling tasks such as answering FAQs, spotting bugs, managing orders, or flagging operational risks.

So, what exactly is an AI agent? It’s an autonomous, proactive app that can make decisions, adapt in real time, and work alongside people and systems. These agents increase efficiency, reduce operational costs, and help teams focus on higher-value strategic work.

For marketers, this means the ability to build and personalize campaigns in minutes, with AI agents pulling real-time customer data and syncing efforts across sales, service, and commerce.  

Key takeaway: AI agents aren’t just automation—they represent the future of scalable, human-centric engagement.

We’re already analyzing internal use cases and identifying client scenarios where autonomous agents can make a real difference, from automating complex tasks to enriching key user interactions in real time.

Trends to watch

AI and data become foundational to marketing, sales, and service. Throughout Connections 2025, Salesforce demonstrated how it’s shaping this new landscape with tools built for real business challenges.

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Data Cloud is becoming the engine behind everything

Agentforce is redefining how work gets done

Marketing Cloud Next is setting a new standard

How are we turning these insights into action at Nortal?

We returned from Connections 2025 with a clear vision: these innovations are not only relevant to our clients’ challenges, but also highly actionable in the work we're already doing.

We've been actively exploring Agentforce and its potential to drive smarter engagement and operational efficiency. Our Salesforce specialists are already implementing AI-related features for our customers and are gaining actionable insights as the technology expands. We have also been researching and implementing internal frameworks and tools as BETA features unveil, including prototypes for customer service automation and marketing journey orchestration. These internal pilots have given us firsthand experience in configuring, deploying, and measuring the performance of intelligent agents within real business contexts.

In parallel, we’re working with clients on discovery sessions to identify where these technologies can bring the most value. From optimizing lead qualification flows to preparing data for Marketing Cloud Next, we're laying the groundwork now to help them activate these tools with purpose and speed.

This shift toward a connected, data-driven, AI-powered marketing ecosystem aligns seamlessly with Nortal’s cross-cloud approach. We focus on building integrated, scalable, and future-ready solutions that deliver faster execution, smarter decision-making, and measurable outcomes.

Salesforce is evolving quickly, and so are we. Our teams are not just staying informed, we’re hands-on, proactive, and committed to helping our clients navigate this transformation with clarity, confidence, and real momentum.

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Wrap-up

Attending Salesforce Connections 2025 was an opportunity to pause, reflect, and look ahead. Experiencing these events in person, away from the remote routine, brings a different kind of value. We reconnected with clients, met with partners, and spoke with new people who, like us, are thinking ahead. Even as a tech leader, Salesforce continues to believe in face-to-face moments and the power of real human connection.

The biggest takeaway? This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about rethinking how we work, where we add value, and how we can elevate what we do. We truly believe AI can challenge us, support us, and push us to think bigger.  

We believe that staying ahead means anticipating change. That mindset helps us guide our clients through their next move with clarity and confidence. Events like Connections reinforce that innovation is a shared responsibility, one that should be reflected in every solution we build. We’re leaving inspired, energized, and ready to turn ideas into action.

Let’s keep the conversation going! Whether you’re exploring what AI can do for your business, or looking for the right partner to help you navigate this next chapter, we’re ready.

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Nortal is a strategic innovation and technology company with an unparalleled track-record of delivering successful transformation projects over 20 years.