Salesforce Inc. today released details about its thinking in acquiring Informatica Inc. despite that company’s apparent overlap with Salesforce’s MuleSoft integration subsidiary.

Executives said the deal is central to building a unified data foundation for agentic artificial intelligence and resolving long-standing issues of fragmented enterprise context. The acquisition addresses a core obstacle in enterprise AI adoption: lack of business context, Rahul Auradkar, executive vice president and general manager of unified data services for Data 360 and AI Foundations at Salesforce, said in a press briefing.

“The models are incredibly intelligent, but they tend to be corporate stupid,” he said. “They know almost everything about the world, but very little about your businesses. Without shared enterprise understanding, the AI agents are forced to guess.”

Informatica Chief Product Officer Krish Vitaldevara said the biggest reason AI projects fail is context gaps caused by data fragmentation, inadequate data or poor data quality. He defined context as “all the background information, relationships and rules that transform raw, isolated data into meaningful, trusted and actionable intelligence.”

Salesforce executives said Informatica provides that missing enterprise-wide context, while MuleSoft continues to supply the real-time operational signals needed to trigger actions.

Complementary roles

The combined stack aligns metadata-rich context from Informatica with MuleSoft’s event-driven connections, Auradkar said. Informatica’s role is to create semantic memory across an enterprise.

“Informatica brings the industry-wide, industry-standard, highly regarded [master data management],” he said. MuleSoft, by contrast, supplies “the real-time operational signals such as inventory changes, shipment delays and order exceptions that enable AI to trigger appropriate actions.”

Data 360, Salesforce’s unified data foundation that brings together its Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft and Informatica technologies under one governed architecture, is the unifying layer.

“Data360 accesses the activation layer, harmonizing financial operational data directly into Salesforce’s metadata using zero copy,” Auradkar said. The goal is to provide “a consistent shared understanding of data about products, assets, customers, interactions, locations, suppliers and more. We replace guessing with reasoning.”

Why Salesforce needed Informatica

Vitaldevara said Informatica operates at a deeper layer of enterprise-wide data management than MuleSoft, as well as across clouds and on-premises. “We are very much vendor-neutral in the sense that we work with every enterprise application,” he said.

He noted that Informatica’s Cloud-scale AI-powered Real-time Engine, a unified metadata intelligence and AI system that powers its Intelligent Data Management Cloud, processes metadata at massive scale, handling more than 140 trillion customer transactions per month.

Salesforce pointed to practical benefits it has seen internally. Auradkar said the company achieved “a 98% reduction in tax adjustments and 20% fewer duplicate accounts,” by applying Informatica MDM with Data360 and MuleSoft to its own fragmented account and product data.

Roadmap: tighter integration

Executives said customers will soon see Informatica metadata and MDM records flow directly into Salesforce systems without custom code. “That will now not require our customers to work with two separate companies,” Auradkar said.

Both companies will also align around shared governance and AI-safe access controls. Auradkar said the combined platform strengthens data protections through “masking, attribute-based access control, data lineage and the ability to do data verification.”

The goal, he said, is to ensure that as AI agents operate across increasingly heterogeneous environments, Salesforce can “respect the governance and the access of data that exists in other systems.”

Vitaldevara said Informatica’s mission remains unchanged. “We have always said we are the Switzerland of data management, and now we are going to be the Switzerland of data and the Switzerland of Ain,” he said.

Photo: Salesforce