Salesforce has announced it will acquire data management giant Informatica for approximately $8 billion. The move signals a major push by Salesforce to reinforce its AI capabilities with cleaner, better-governed data—an essential ingredient for building truly autonomous, agentic AI tools.
Informatica is best known for its data integration, governance, and metadata management platforms—tools designed to help businesses understand, clean, and trust the information flowing through their systems. With this acquisition, Salesforce plans to supercharge its own platforms, including Data Cloud, Agentforce, MuleSoft, and Tableau.
Why this matters for AI
AI systems are only as good as the data they’re trained and run on. While Salesforce has built a reputation as a leader in CRM and cloud-based analytics, managing the quality of its customers’ data has often required third-party support. Informatica changes that.
Incorporating Informatica’s technology into Salesforce’s ecosystem will help improve:
- Transparency: Showing how data moves through systems, aiding audits and compliance
- Context: Enhancing how AI tools interpret data by tying it to business logic
- Governance: Enforcing quality, privacy, and usage policies at scale
The ultimate goal? Smarter AI agents that don’t just act—but act responsibly.
Deep integration with Salesforce products
This acquisition isn’t just about bolting on a new tool—it’s about embedding Informatica’s capabilities across Salesforce’s core platforms:
- Data Cloud: Ensuring the data feeding AI tools is trusted and ready
- Agentforce: Giving AI agents a richer understanding of the context they operate in
- Customer 360: Providing sales and service teams with higher-quality insights
- MuleSoft: Enhancing API reliability with data lineage and governance
- Tableau: Enabling more accurate, actionable dashboards with organized backend data
As CTO Steve Fisher put it, this is about helping AI “understand data’s full context—origin, transformation, quality, and governance.”
Business and financial impact
Salesforce plans to fund the purchase with a mix of cash and debt, and it expects the acquisition to begin boosting earnings and cash flow starting in year two. The boards of both companies have approved the deal, and 63% of Informatica shareholders have already signed off.
CFO Robin Washington emphasized that this isn’t just a flashy purchase—it’s a targeted move aligned with Salesforce’s long-term strategy to deliver value in key sectors like healthcare, government, and financial services.
What happens next
After regulatory clearance, Salesforce plans to move quickly to embed Informatica’s tools across its platform stack. The company also plans to invest in Informatica’s partner ecosystem and expand its reach through Salesforce’s own marketing and sales channels.
For users, the impact could be significant: more trustworthy data, more powerful AI, and deeper insights across every Salesforce touchpoint.
In a world where AI is rapidly reshaping business, this deal makes one thing clear—Salesforce doesn’t just want to play with data. It wants to master it.
Source:https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/news/salesforce-to-buy-informatica-in-8b-deal/
