Salesforce Connections (CNX) 2026 took over McCormick Place in Chicago on June 3–4 with a bold ambition and a point to prove. After a year of uncertainty around Marketing Cloud Next, the event was Salesforce's answer to a question many customers had started asking out loud: is Salesforce still serious about Marketing and Commerce, or would simpler, more focused platforms be better suited to meet modern marketers where they are on the agentic adoption curve?
Patrick Stokes, Salesforce's newly appointed CMO, invited the audience to discover "The Marketing Maker Era," a world where marketers are freed to express their creativity, backed by agentic capabilities that accelerate creation, fast-track testing and optimization, and finally make true marketing ROI measurable.
This year at CNX, Salesforce unveiled no fewer than 250 new features and innovations, translating that vision into tangible capabilities and helping marketers move from a static, campaign-by-campaign past toward marketing that’s always-on, adaptive, and agentic.
Three Announcements to Be Excited About
A Real Content Supply Chain
Salesforce aficionados have long awaited a serious investment in content management. Previous efforts never gained traction, meaning the platform never quite had the enterprise-grade content engine it deserved.
On June 1st, that changed: Salesforce announced its agreement to acquire Contentful, a modern, headless, composable solution that finally bridges the gap. Paired with Headless 360 and Data 360, it promises a robust, end-to-end content supply chain wired natively into the Salesforce ecosystem: the missing layer that lets agents assemble and deliver personalized experiences at scale. Proactively addressing this opportunity, Merkle has developed Arc, our proprietary accelerator that connects Agentforce for Commerce with composable CMS platforms like Contentful.
Identity-Enriched Experience Optimization
At CNX, Salesforce announced several critical updates to Agentforce Marketing and Data 360. The most significant: Identity Boost. This new feature layers partner data and identities (such as dentsu.audiences) onto existing profiles, helping brands read the right signals and tailor consumer experiences to real purchase intent.
Combined with capabilities like Campaign Optimization and dentsu Mirai, marketers now have the ultimate toolkit for true 1:1 personalization, activating across every channel and driving smarter marketing spend.
Merkle is building on this momentum. We’re co-developing, with and for Salesforce, the future of advertising, where paid and owned channels converge to drive greater marketing efficiency. We are excited to head to Cannes in a few weeks to showcase the progress on this collaboration.
The Agent Lives Inside the Storefront
The most vivid proof of the agentic vision came from Merkle's luxury retail demo. The AI agent played the role of a bantō, the head clerk of a traditional Japanese merchant house who knew every customer and acted with judgment on the house's behalf. The demo featured one customer, followed across three surfaces: recognized in the boutique, remembered on a storefront that never re-asks who she is, and followed up with an email written for her, not a segment.
What makes it real is the storefront itself. Salesforce's new Storefront Next is an AI-first, React-based storefront that continues the platform’s evolution from SiteGenesis to SFRA to Composable Storefront. It can be set up in under 30 minutes, ships with more than 40 pre-built agent skills, and includes a native MCP server (expected to be generally available June 2026).
The agent no longer sits next to the storefront. It sits inside it. Built on Headless 360 and governed by the Trust Layer, this is production-ready and is exactly what Merkle is building for brands today.
Our Conclusion
For the first time in a while, the announcements coming out of CNX landed as genuinely credible. Clients heard capabilities they can believe in and plan around, not just roadmap aspirations. That shift in reception is its own headline.
It’s exciting to watch Salesforce drive real convergence across its product offering, bringing Marketing, Commerce, and Sales and Service onto one unified foundation rather than leaving customers to stitch the clouds together themselves. At a moment when the industry is openly debating a "SaaSapocalypse," CNX 2026 was Salesforce's clearest signal yet that it has a deep pipeline, a serious backlog, and the conviction to act decisively on both.
The question that opened the event, whether Salesforce is still serious about Marketing and Commerce, now has an answer. For our clients, and for us at Merkle, that’s a future well worth building toward.
