Enterprises are racing to deploy AI, yet many systems still struggle to produce reliable results. More than 80% of AI projects fail with inadequate data as a top root cause — underscoring that accuracy depends not just on models, but on the quality, consistency, and meaning of the data underneath.
Today, we are expanding our Data 360 portfolio with Informatica to help customers solve that challenge. Informatica adds deeper metadata intelligence, lineage visibility, governance, and data quality to Data 360, while MuleSoft provides real-time operational signals and the ability to trigger secure actions across systems. Together, these capabilities give AI a complete, connected understanding of the business — strengthening every Salesforce application and forming the trusted enterprise context AI needs to operate accurately at scale.
What Is Context and Why AI Needs It
Context is everything an AI system needs to interpret information — and then reason about it and take action — the way a human operator would. It defines what something is, how it relates to the rest of the business, where it originated, what policies govern its use, and whether it reflects the current state of operations. In practice, context functions as digital working memory and institutional knowledge — the background, relationships, rules, and history that allow AI to operate with confidence and accuracy.
Without context, even powerful AI struggles to answer basic business questions. Information sits in different systems, defined in different ways, with no shared understanding of how products, customers, orders, and events connect. A simple question like “Which customers might be affected by a defective product batch?” becomes surprisingly difficult to resolve. AI can see fragments — the batch in manufacturing, the order in commerce, the shipment in logistics — but it cannot tell how those pieces fit together or which version of the data is correct. It sees data, but not meaning.
With trusted context, the picture changes entirely. Context connects those same fragments into a coherent story: which products came from which batches, which customers received them, the live shipment or service status, and what actions should be taken next. AI can follow the full thread, understand the implications, and determine an appropriate response — whether that’s identifying affected customers, pausing shipments, or triggering a service workflow. Instead of guessing, AI can reason with the same clarity a human expert would bring to the problem. This ability to connect meaning, history, and real-time operations into a complete understanding is what closes the “last mile” of enterprise AI — the gap between pattern recognition and reliable execution.
Together, Data 360, Informatica, and MuleSoft now form Salesforce’s trusted data foundation — a harmonized, federated, and governed environment that gives AI the meaningful enterprise context it needs to operate accurately and safely. This foundation reduces hallucinations, strengthens every Salesforce application, and enables intelligent agents to execute real business workflows with precision.
How the Expanded Data 360 Portfolio Delivers Enterprise Context
Trusted enterprise context emerges from the combined capabilities of Salesforce’s expanded Data 360 portfolio. Each part of the portfolio addresses a key enterprise AI challenge — understanding meaning, tracing history, ensuring trust, harmonizing data, and maintaining real-time awareness — giving AI the accuracy required to operate across the systems customers rely on today.
Data 360 provides the activation layer that brings enterprise data into Salesforce without copying or moving it. Using Zero Copy, Data 360 harmonizes ERP, commerce, financial, and operational data directly into Salesforce’s metadata model. In Q3, customers used Data 360 to process more than 32 trillion records, including 15 trillion through Zero Copy, as they expanded unified profiles, analytics, and AI-driven automation. More than half of Data 360 bookings came from existing customers expanding their use of the product — reinforcing Data 360’s role as the operational context layer for Agentforce.
Informatica supplies deep metadata intelligence that defines what core business entities represent across ERP, finance, supply chain, HR, and commerce. It establishes shared meaning or context by interpreting how products, suppliers, customers, and assets connect across disparate systems that were never designed to align. Informatica provides end-to-end lineage to show where data originated and how it has changed, helping AI assess reliability and avoid decisions based on incomplete or conflicting information. Its governance and quality capabilities ensure AI operates on trusted, compliant data aligned with enterprise standards.
MuleSoft provides the API and integration fabric that allows Agentforce to take action. Agents don’t just need context — they need tools and system access. MuleSoft delivers real-time operational signals (inventory changes, order statuses, shipment delays, exceptions) and provides AI secure connectivity into ERP, supply chain, HR, finance, and custom systems so it can execute end-to-end enterprise workflows with precision.
Together, these capabilities transform meaning, history, governance, harmonization, and real-time signals into context — the foundation that allows AI to act with accuracy across every workflow and surface.
At our scale, inconsistent definitions across systems used to slow decision-making and limit what AI could automate,” said Scott Strickland, Chief Commercial Officer, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. “The combination of Informatica, Data 360, MuleSoft, and Agentforce is giving us a clear, trusted view of hotels, guests, and franchisees. That level of context is helping us move faster and automate processes that used to require significant manual effort.”
Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica accelerates our ability to build a unified, trusted data ecosystem across Yamaha,” said Andy McCann, Digital Transformation Architect at Yamaha Motor Corporation, USA. “By bringing these platforms together, we can finally break down long-standing data silos and give every business unit—from Motorsports to Marine to Watercraft—access to clean, governed, consistently modeled data. This strengthens our ‘One Yamaha’ strategy by enabling shared insights, seamless customer experiences, and a more synchronized global digital foundation. Most importantly, it positions us to safely scale AI-driven personalization, automation, and innovation across the entire Yamaha customer journey.”
AI is only as good as the understanding behind it, and that understanding comes from context,” said Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM, Data 360 and AI Foundations at Salesforce. “By bringing Informatica into the Data 360 portfolio and combining it with the real-time connectivity of MuleSoft, we’re giving customers a foundation of trusted enterprise context that strengthens every AI, automation, and analytics outcome. This is not about adding another product; it’s about expanding Data 360’s mission to help enterprises use all of their data with confidence, accuracy, and transparency across Agentforce, Tableau, and every application they rely on.”
