We are witnessing a fundamental shift in enterprise architecture. Over the last decade, a major objective of architectural initiatives has been to automate workflows and gain efficiency. Today, that goal has moved, and we have entered the era of the Agentic Enterprise.

In this new reality, it is no longer sufficient to have hard-coded business logic on top of a database. By supplementing, replacing, or integrating these workflows with intelligent, autonomous agents, businesses are gaining additional efficiencies. These agents are now capable of reasoning, making decisions, and taking action.

Why agentic architectures need more data awareness

These actions are entirely dependent on the quality and depth of the data available. 

Consider two scenarios:

1. A supply chain agent re-routing an order must synthesize supplier reliability, real-time weather, and cross-region inventory
2. A service agent negotiating a refund needs instant access to customer lifetime value, recent sentiment, and margin thresholds

This reliance on data introduces a massive architectural challenge. If an agent is fed fragmented, siloed, or duplicate data, it may not error out, but it may instead build a flawed model of reality. It risks executing a transaction based on false premises. To build an Agentic Enterprise that is both powerful and safe, we need a data foundation built on absolute trust and deep context.

Unlike a human employee, an agent lacks the intuition to spot a duplicate customer record or question a suspicious inventory number. Agents need help to understand the meaning behind the data. Therefore, the data feed must be pristine, governed, and unified before the agent ever touches it. 

Architecting context for the Agentic Enterprise

Architecting for agents requires rethinking long-standing assumptions about how the data is integrated, governed, and operationalized.

When the consumer of data is a machine making autonomous decisions, the requirements for data management shift from connectivity to precision.

Achieving this requires specific architectural capabilities:

• Contextual intelligence via metadata: Agents take data literally and, unlike human users, they cannot infer if a dataset is outdated. Because agents rely on metadata to function safely, architects must prioritize a fabric that explicitly maps lineage, quality scores, and origin. This metadata layer allows the agent to mathematically evaluate the trustworthiness of its inputs before executing a decision.
• Unified master data: Conflicting records paralyze autonomous logic. If an agent encounters disparate status codes for the same customer across Salesforce and an ERP, it cannot resolve the conflict without risking a process failure. Reliable autonomy benefits tremendously from a pre-mastered “golden record.” This is a single, reconciled view of customers, products, and assets that serves as the undisputed source of truth for every automated action.
• Embedded governance: Data errors can lead to incorrect actions. In an autonomous system, there is no opportunity for reactive cleanup once a refund is issued or stock is moved. Compliance policies and privacy rules must be active components of the data pipeline, filtering out non-compliant or sensitive information before the agent can access it.

Achieving this level of trust across a fragmented enterprise landscape requires a platform purpose-built for data management. 

How Salesforce and Informatica work together

Informatica offers a cloud-native, AI-powered platform for holistic data management. Its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) serves as a comprehensive toolkit for managing the enterprise data landscape.

Architects can build a trusted, unified data foundation by combining Salesforce’s unparalleled view of the customer relationship with Informatica’s enterprise-grade data management. This combination transforms enterprise-wide data into a core asset for autonomous action.

There are four key areas where Salesforce and Informatica complement each other to deliver the Agentic Enterprise together:

1. Universal metadata intelligence: Salesforce manages metadata within its own ecosystem. Informatica’s AI engine, CLAIRE, discovers and maps metadata and lineage across the entire enterprise, providing a truly universal catalog. This provides architects with complete visibility into the origin and transformation of data, which is critical for trust and compliance.
2. True multi-domain MDM: Informatica provides comprehensive Master Data Management (MDM) for all critical business domains, including customers, products, suppliers, assets, and locations, creating a single, trusted “golden record” for the entire enterprise.
3. Enterprise data fabric: Informatica builds the underlying data fabric. It specializes in high-volume, complex data integration and quality from disparate systems, such as ERPs and data lakes. This provides a trusted, AI-ready data foundation to act upon with confidence.
4. The universal bridge: Informatica’s vendor-neutral design unifies and governs your entire data estate across any cloud (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) and hybrid environment. This ensures that all data is trusted and ready for use within Salesforce to drive autonomous action.

How Informatica brings the Agentic Enterprise to life

Informatica’s platform provides the core capabilities to build this new foundation. Its AI engine, CLAIRE, creates an intelligent data fabric that powers the entire agentic journey.

Here’s how it works:

• Builds the brain with metadata management: Informatica actively scans and understands your entire data landscape. It utilizes this metadata to construct an enterprise knowledge graph, which is a comprehensive map of all your data assets and their interrelationships. For an AI agent, this is a game-changer. It provides the context to understand that a “customer ID” in one system is equivalent to a “client number” in another.
• Provides high-quality insights with data quality & multi-domain MDM: An agent is only as good as the data it consumes. Informatica’s tools profile, cleanse, and standardize data automatically. Its Master Data Management (MDM) capability creates a single, trusted “golden record” for your most critical data.This ensures agents act on the right information every time.
• Sets the guardrails with data governance: Informatica allows you to embed policies for data access, privacy, and usage directly into your data fabric. This ensures that your autonomous agents operate safely and ethically. It also maintains full compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
• Creates an enterprise data pipeline with cloud-native data integration: Powerful integration capabilities connect this intelligent data core to your applications, like Salesforce. This enables agents to seamlessly access trusted information and trigger actions within the systems where work is done.

Before applying these capabilities in practice, it’s important to step back and define the core architectural principles that guide trusted, agent-driven systems.

Key takeaways for architects

As you design your agentic frameworks, keep these principles top of mind:

• Prioritize context over connectivity: Focus on the relationships and meaning you build around your data, as these are where the real architectural challenges and value reside.
• Metadata provides the missing context: Supply explicit metadata, such as origin and freshness, so agents can judge the reliability of data points.
• Master your core data domains: Identify your most critical data (customers, products, assets) and create a single source of truth to provide a mastered “golden record,” allowing agents to execute faster and reliably.
• Embed governance as a guardrail: Filter out sensitive or non-compliant data in the pipeline itself to ensure that the agent never accesses unauthorized information.

To build agentic frameworks you can actually trust, remember that context is king. This is achieved by mastering core data on a metadata foundation with strong governance built in from day one.

The journey to an autonomous enterprise starts with the right architectural approach. By focusing on a metadata-driven, intelligent data management platform, you can build the trusted, adaptable, and context-aware systems that will define the future of business.

Want to learn more? See how Salesforce and Informatica are working together to power the next generation of intelligent applications: Informatica is now part of Salesforce: Trusted Context at Scale.