With Salesforce Connections kicking off later today, many customers are looking ahead to what’s next for the CRM giant, and how the marketing and CX landscape may evolve over the next 12 months.
According to one Salesforce partner, this year’s event is expected to mark a shift from AI ambition to real-world execution, with a strong focus on agentic marketing operations, composable architectures, and practical use cases that reduce day-to-day complexity for marketers.
For marketers, Connections 2026 may signal the beginning of a more operational, less theoretical AI era.
Speaking with CX Today, Lauren Noonan, VP of Growth & Alliances, at Sercante | Trilliad, a Salesforce Partner, encapsulates the expected theme from Salesforce Connections, transitioning from AI hype to execution.
“If you’re not actually building proofs of concept or testing AI in the day‑to‑day now, you are unfortunately behind,” she explained.
“This is the year where marketers move from talking about AI to actually shipping with it, and that’s a very different conversation.”
Agentic Marketing Operations Moves from Concept to Reality
At Salesforce Connections 2026, agentic marketing operations are expected to move from an emerging concept to a defining pillar of Salesforce’s marketing vision.
Rather than positioning AI as a collection of isolated features, Salesforce is expected to showcase how agentic AI can fundamentally reshape the way marketing teams operate day to day.
Why Marketing Ops Is Ripe for Agentic AI
Noonan predicts that one of the dominating themes at Salesforce Connections 2026 will be agentic marketing operations, where AI agents take a far more active role in managing campaign execution from end to end.
In fact, “there’s likely going to be a lot of announcements about a new agentic console that marketers can use to support them across the campaign build lifecycle,” Noonan argued.
The opportunity here is to automate the operational work that sits between strategy and launch, where agentic tools could orchestrate many of these tasks automatically, enabling teams to focus more on planning, creativity, and customer engagement.
"Anywhere from two to six weeks is the average time I hear from the moment a campaign brief is written to when it's deployed,” Noonan continued.
“That's just insane when you break down how manual every step still is."
Despite advances in marketing technology, many organizations continue to rely on manual-intensive workflows that slow execution and limit agility.
Fixing the Usability Gap in Marketing Cloud
Salesforce's growing emphasis on agentic workflows could also help address the ease of use challenge for marketers, with many finding it difficult to navigate and manage the platform efficiently as campaign execution processes become more complex.
"One of the biggest gaps Marketing Cloud has had over the last two years has been ease of use, so innovating through the lens of the marketer is going to win over some hearts and minds,” explained Noonan.
As a result, agentic functionality could simplify complex workflows, reduce manual work to execute campaigns, and make complex capabilities more accessible.
Furthermore, teams will often spend extra time managing campaign production and deployment, leaving little time to analyze results and refine next steps.
“Before a campaign even launches, marketers are already onto the next brief,” she argues.
“There's no time left to analyze what worked, what didn't, and how to optimize. We have to break that cycle to unlock the next era of value."
Automating administrative and operational tasks could therefore free marketers to focus on performance improvement, helping organizations gain greater value from marketing investments.
From AI Hype to Proof-of-Concept Execution
Noonan also expects Salesforce Connections 2026 to highlight a broader shift in how organizations are approaching artificial intelligence, seeing the conversation move from questioning its importance to demonstrating tangible progress.
Even today, many organizations are continuing to explore AI's potential by developing strategies and discussing future applications, but not moving toward implementation.
As a result, customers are increasingly being judged by their ability to translate those AI ambitions into practical use cases.
How the Customer Conversation Has Changed
Customer attitudes toward AI have evolved over the past three years, from where many organizations were concerned about whether they were falling behind competitors to customers now shifting their attention toward developing formal AI strategies and roadmaps.
"In 2024, customers were asking, ‘If I’m not doing something with AI, am I behind?’ In 2025 it became, ‘If I don’t have a plan, am I behind?’,” said Noonan.