Dreamforce 2025 Download: Data 360, Agentforce Marketing, and Why Starting Small Is the Strategy for Scaling AI Native Success

As I sit on my flight back to Arkansas from San Francisco I’m stuck on one key theme from Dreamforce 2025: Salesforce customers want to understand where to start and how to activate with AI. The conversations had a rhythm, an overlap, whereas it seemed as if there was a tangible shift from thinking about AI as a visionary to instead mapping how to act with AI at scale. 

For all the highlight reel readers, you’re in luck – your headlines will guide you to the quick takeaways below 😉 

If you’re looking for more than the high level review of Dreamforce 2025, even better – do me a favor and put on your best abstract thought hat as you read along. Here’s a wild card for anyone still reading this long intro paragraph (as I again break the fourth wall like any good prior theater gal) – the keynotes at this year’s Dreamforce followed that path of shifting from visionary thinking to scaling with action – wild thought – what if we, as a community, as humans, have hit the point by which we are actually becoming AI native? 

My big takeaways from Dreamforce 2025: 

1. Goodbye Data Cloud, Hello Data 360 
2. Agentforce Marketing 
3. Better Agentforce Controls 
4. Starting Small with AI Adoption 
5. Next Chapter of ListEngage with TCS

Click on the jump links above if you’re feeling super fancy to jump to each section 🎩

1. The Renaming Reality: Goodbye Data Cloud, Hello Data 360

Let’s start with the big name change that dominated the conversation: Salesforce renamed a product again. Data Cloud is so last season, and Data 360 is this year’s hottest look.

This change signals a major evolution. The focus is moving beyond the traditional “cloud view” and centering instead on the activation of data. This shift was so critical that the entire platform update was referenced as Agentforce 360.

I always say, data is the king, queen, bishop, and every pawn on the chessboard. Dreamforce spent a ton of time aligning data as the clear foundation for AI. 

A few key features defining Data 360’s evolution:

• Intelligent Context: This new tool is designed to make AI more accurate with unstructured data by stripping out and organizing context from complex documents. This is on deck to go Generally Available (GA) in October.
• Data 360 Clean Rooms: This seriously game-changing feature allows partners (like an airline and a hotel, for instance) to collaborate on select data to identify shared, hidden audiences without sharing sensitive customer data. You can keep a lookout for this one closer to the winter release, it’s planned for GA in December.
• Zero Copy Wins: Data 360 is a new product name, but the tried and true value of zero copy had KPIs ready to run with the new naming convention. Salesforce shared that Zero Copy function has been estimated to save $10 million in engineering costs. Wild. 

Wanna see a demo of Data 360? Click here to see a 360 profile build demo. It’s pretty cool. 

2. Agentforce Marketing: Ending the ‘Do-Not-Reply‘ Era

The most critical thematic element during the Marketing Keynote focused squarely on the shift to autonomous, two-way conversation, suggesting that the days of the dreaded “do-not-reply” email should be permanently archived.

The biggest thing to note when I remove all my philosophical pontification is the reality of this new era of Agentforce Marketing being accessible to everyone with a current Marketing Cloud instance, no matter the flavor of Marketing Cloud. 

Agentforce Marketing is Salesforce’s complete agentic marketing solution, reframing marketing by powering it with autonomous AI agents that act as always-on collaborators. These agents transform ‘do-not-reply’ messages into agentic engagements where it’s like every channel is an Oprah episode with “you get a two-way conversation,” exclamation across every channel.

For me, the Marketing Keynote came down to these key concepts:

• Bring, Don’t Build: If you want to use Agentforce Marketing capabilities, you don’t have to re–build your current journeys or data extensions. There is a native connector that allows you to bring your existing assets right into the new agentic world.
• Autonomous Action: Marketers define the strategy (e.g., “increase loyalty among at-risk customers”), and AI agents handle the execution, performing complex tasks like campaign assembly, optimization, and 1:1 personalization.
• Key Agent Actions: Agentforce Campaign Creation allows marketers to build and deploy campaigns in hours, collaborating with agents to generate briefs, create audiences, draft content, and set up customer journeys. Agentforce Paid Media Optimization monitors ad performance constantly, pausing underperforming ads and recommending improvements based on business goals. Agents also handle Lead Generation & Management 24/7 across web and email, drafting personalized outreach and booking meetings.
• A tangible demo, not a visionary statement: This demo was likely my favorite demo of any keynote I’ve ever attended. It was not only tangible, but it answered the demand of the ecosystem: how do I actually do it? Plus – I’m a marketing gal who’s using this tech myself to talk to folks – this keynote shifted my Q4 goals to be more aspirational. I’m going to be testing this out myself and reporting back here on the blog in near real-time. 

Wanna see this demo I’m raving about? Great. So glad you asked. I took pictures of the presentation because I was that jacked up —- look at this two-way conversation from the marketing keynote: 

If you didn’t catch the Marketing Keynote – watch it on demand. It’s a solid 12/10 keynote.

3. Agentforce is Enterprise-Ready and Controllable

Since agents are non-deterministic and adapt, Salesforce focused heavily on making Agentforce predictable and controllable for mission-critical processes.

• New Controls for Consistency: To manage the balance between consistency and adaptability, they introduced conditional controls, which allow users to inject IF THEN statements directly into an agent’s reasoning. 
• Transparency and the Builder: Salesforce refreshed the Agentforce Builder, providing a cleaner interface and much-needed transparency into how the Atlas Reasoning Engine makes decisions. This eliminates the agentic silo, allowing teams to understand why an agent made a decision, which is crucial for troubleshooting. The new builder also includes a visual simulator. You can use the simulator for testing agents, saving time and flex credits.
• Voice is Ready: Agentforce Voice is now Generally Available (GA), with agents configurable for tone, style, and accent – we’ll share more on this on a dedicated blog later. Stay tuned. 

Observability: Agentforce Observability aims to provide end-to-end visibility into agent performance and business impact, including session-level insights called Moments and agent-level ROI tracking. You can expect this feature to become GA in November.

4. Adoption Strategy: Starting Small for Maximum Momentum

The biggest encouragement for Trailblazers determined to actually go-live with AI is the focus on small use cases that scale. It’s no longer a question of when we implement AI—the time is now—but rather how we scale our foundational efforts.

We must abandon the idea of needing perfect data before beginning; many customers sit on the sidelines overanalyzing data purity while competitors move forward. Instead, we need to focus on achievable use cases and adopt the “crawl-walk-run method”. Success starts with finding where your organization is struggling or where there is a lot of manual effort and funneling that into a use case that can be actioned in a relatively small and easy time frame.

I’m sure you’ve read the near infamous MIT study at this point, the looming fear of being in the 95% that fails in AI pilot programs is evident more now than ever. I have a bit of a warm glow on it though – the cause is known. Those who succeed in AI adoption are doing so largely because they plan for friction. It might be the communication background creating a bias here, but my secondary thought for planning for friction is that these 5% of achievers are also starting small. They’re not trying to revolutionize overnight with AI – they’re starting small (and often with internal use cases) to gain adoption for AI, then they’re scaling. We’re not in a race, but if we were, the tortoise who chose the small step first is going to win. 

The Next Chapter of ListEngage with TCS 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also highlight the biggest shift for my sub-culture at ListEngage, we joined our new parent company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – and this was the true highlight for me from a perspective of relative joy. 

The team at TCS felt like 1) I had known them for years 2) aligned to the ListEngage tenacious frame of mind 3) were so brilliant. I was surprised how many conversations felt like old friends coming together, yet I had only introduced myself moments prior – this ecosystem (and world) is nothing short of wonderful. 

TCS acquired the company I have been with for three years, ListEngage, last Friday. Read the full press release on the acquisition here – but for a good framing of the acquisition, here’s what my buddy Pratik said, “opens a world of opportunity to scale and innovate even more with AI,” and he’s right. We spent a lot of time talking about Data, AI, Marketing Cloud, and the next gen solution we’re bringing to customers. 

I jokingly told a few folks that if I had to pay a nickel every time I said “syngery,” this past week I’d not only have my tech-bro badge, but also be down more money than I’d want to admit. The honest truth is that synergy was the best word to describe everything though – it was synergistic – the alignment from solution, to strategy, to culture. Goodness – even the sessions aligned whereby Altaf, ListEngage CEO & Founder, joined a panel discussion with customers and our TCS family focusing on AI. Only to be followed the next day by Julie & Pratik leading a round table on AI adoption, and Altaf having a campfire chat circling around AI, too. It was synergy. 

Dreamforce was a lot of things – but most of all – it was the first page of a new chapter. From Agentforce Marketing, to tangible demos, to starting a new era at ListEngage – it felt like the first step down a blue brick road. 

1. A download on Dreamforce 2025
2. Supporting creating your big vision for AI 
3. Enable AI at scale, based on where you are right now
4. One-on-one session focusing on Salesforce solutions 
5. Something else (because I’m sure there is something else?)