Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Informatica, the enterprise cloud data management firm, in a strategic move designed to secure the data infrastructure required for its next-generation artificial intelligence.

The closing of the deal marks a significant expansion of Salesforce’s technological footprint, integrating Informatica’s vast data catalog and governance capabilities directly into the Salesforce platform. The acquisition is the linchpin of Chief Executive Marc Benioff’s pivot toward “agentic AI”—autonomous systems capable of executing complex workflows rather than merely generating text.

‘The True Fuel of Agentforce’

For Salesforce, the logic behind the acquisition is rooted in the industry-wide struggle to make generative AI reliable for business use. Without pristine, well-governed data, AI models are prone to “hallucinations,” or confident errors.

“You have to get your data right to get your AI right,” Benioff said in a statement Tuesday. “Data and context are the true fuel of Agentforce, and without clean, connected, trusted data, there is no intelligence—only hallucination.”

By absorbing Informatica, Salesforce aims to provide the rigorous data context needed for its Agentforce 360 platform to operate safely at an enterprise scale.

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Integration and Metadata

The deal will see Informatica’s technology stack merged with MuleSoft, Salesforce’s existing integration platform. This combination is designed to establish a comprehensive data foundation that enables autonomous agents to interpret information across disparate systems.

Crucially, the acquisition bolsters Salesforce’s metadata capabilities. By pulling in lineage and context from outside the Salesforce ecosystem, the company hopes to make its AI responses more explainable and accurate. This “unified metadata foundation” will also feed into Tableau, Salesforce’s analytics platform, to provide deeper context for business intelligence.

Amit Walia, the chief executive of Informatica, described the merger as an acceleration of his company’s mission to act as the “Switzerland” of data management—a neutral, universal connector for enterprise information.

“By integrating Informatica’s data management capabilities… businesses around the world can drive innovation, efficiency and growth by leveraging a single vendor,” Walia said.

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Financial Outlook

Salesforce has moved aggressively to reassure investors regarding the financial impact of the deal. The company stated that it expects the acquisition to be accretive to non-GAAP operating margins and earnings per share within 12 months—a timeline accelerated by a full year compared to original projections.

Management is expected to discuss the transaction’s impact on fiscal 2026 guidance during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, scheduled for Dec. 3.

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