Salesforce Boosts Bet on Agentic AI With $8B Informatica Takeover
Salesforce’s offer beat out competitors including Cloud Software Group and Thoma Bravo, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Sign up for smart news, insights, and analysis on the biggest financial stories of the day.
The forecast is cloudy with a high chance of AI for Salesforce after its agreement to pay $8 billion for software firm Informatica, which manages cloud data for companies from Toyota to Unilever.
Salesforce’s offer beat out competitors including Cloud Software Group and Thoma Bravo, according to The Wall Street Journal. The purchase would be Salesforce’s biggest since its $28 billion acquisition of Slack in 2021.
The Agentic AI Race
AI agents are the next level of AI assistants. Instead of answering simple queries, they’re built to perform complex tasks autonomously — such as answering customer service calls.
Salesforce offers AI-agent services like the above through its “Agentforce” platform, for which it has closed more than 1,000 deals so far. Last week, Salesforce expanded the platform to financial services with virtual representatives that can, for instance, make loan recommendations.
The Informatica acquisition will enable Salesforce to continue scaling up its platform, helping to create “the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said.
But Salesforce isn’t the only company pushing into agentic AI:
- Microsoft began launching AI agents last year, including an “Interpreter” that can live-translate nine languages in Teams meetings and a “Project Manager” that can create plans, assign tasks, and track them.
- OpenAI introduced a new agent that can code this month, its third agentic offering, while cloud provider Oracle offers more than 50 specialized AI agents. Meta expects its AI model to power agents that’ll be used by hundreds of millions of businesses.
Future-Proofing: Salesforce has been under pressure to pump up profits since activist investing firm Elliott Management took a stake in the tech company two years ago. After years of backing off acquisitions to preserve capital, Salesforce is once again making deals with the hope that they’ll pay off in the long run. The Informatica deal is on the smaller side compared with some of Salesforce’s past purchases, and considering how hyped Big Tech is about agentic AI, it has a lot of potential upside. Earlier this month, Salesforce signed an agreement to buy Convergence, another company that would boost its AI agent offerings.
