At Dreamforce, we heard from marketers across every kind of business: big brands and niche brands, B2B and B2C. Their businesses look very different. But the same shifts are changing how their customers discover, decide, and engage.
They start anywhere, move across channels, and decide at any moment. More and more, when they want to discover something new, compare options, or decide what to buy, they turn to AI. And AI isn’t simply finding information. It’s forming the answer.
That means your brand is being shaped across more touchpoints than ever, for both the people making decisions and the agents helping them decide. And there’s a limit to how much any team can anticipate, map, and configure in advance.
Marketing Cloud is built for this reality. It multiplies every marketer with agents that act on their strategy, bringing together the context, content, campaigns, and conversations needed to carry that strategy forward.
Here are five ways that shift is showing up across Marketing Cloud.
1. Shape what AI says about your brand
For years, digital marketing focused on bringing people to your website. Now, more discovery happens before customers ever arrive.
Answer engines are becoming a new front door. AI can recommend, exclude, or characterize your brand before a customer sees a page you control. So the question isn’t just whether you show up. It’s how your brand is being represented.
Palmata gives marketers that visibility. It shows how answer engines represent your company, what’s shaping that perception, and which changes are most likely to improve it.
And AI doesn’t distinguish between “marketing content” and everything else your company publishes. A help article, technical documentation, or an old product page can all shape the answer.
That’s where Contentful comes in. Contentful gives marketers a structured, reusable content foundation built for humans and agents, so trusted content can be managed once and used across websites, apps, campaigns, and agent-powered experiences.
Together, they close the loop. Palmata can identify the content influencing an AI answer, recommend a change, and simulate its impact. Through MCP connections, an AI assistant can act on that recommendation and publish the updated content through Contentful.
See how your brand is represented. Understand what’s shaping the answer. Improve the source. Measure what changes.
2. Run campaigns that improve themselves
Most campaigns still launch with the important decisions already made: the audience, content, channels, timing, journey logic, and more.
But customers don’t behave according to a plan.
Intent changes. Performance shifts. Customers qualify for multiple campaigns at once. Sometimes another campaign is the better fit. Sometimes the right decision is to send nothing at all.
The new Campaign Agent takes on more of those decisions in pursuit of the goal the marketer sets.
Start with a plan, brief, and goal. The campaign agent helps assemble the campaign, recommend an audience, and create personalized, on-brand content grounded in the same strategy and creative context.
After launch, it keeps working. The agent evaluates customer context and intent, prioritizes between competing campaigns, suppresses messages that shouldn’t be sent, and uses performance signals to keep improving toward the goal.
For a brand like Under Armour, with more than 50 million subscribers across channels, that scale matters. Campaigns have traditionally required weeks of work across creative, testing, and approvals. The Campaign Agent brings more of that work together while making customer-level decisions no team could feasibly manage by hand.
This isn’t just faster campaign production. It’s a shift from campaigns that execute a predefined plan to campaigns that keep working toward the goals you set.
3. Transform every channel into an adaptive experience
Customers don’t think about your web team, lifecycle team, or messaging stack. They expect the next interaction to make sense.
Traditional personalization requires marketers to anticipate the experiences customers might need, build the variations, and define the rules. The next step is experiences that can respond as customer behavior and intent change.
Across web, journeys, messaging, and mobile, Marketing Cloud is making more of those experiences adaptive.
Adaptive Web: Quick Setup makes it faster to launch personalized web experiences. Personalized Paths in Flow brings more responsive decision-making into customer journeys. RCS Messaging adds rich, interactive messaging alongside email, SMS, and WhatsApp. And Mobile Flash Sending delivers at massive scale when timing matters.
Formula 1 shows that scale in action. With fan data spread across more than 100 systems, F1 brought that context together into real-time profiles. Today, it can send millions of fan notifications in 90 seconds, while its conversational fan experience generated 6,000 interactions in its first weekend.
The goal isn’t another channel. It’s an experience that carries context forward as the customer moves.
4. Turn B2B buying signals into pipeline
Demand generation ultimately comes down to one number: pipeline.
But intent rarely shows up exactly where the funnel says it should. An account heats up. A buying committee member engages. A prospect arrives on your site with a specific question.
Creating demand isn’t enough. You have to act on it while it’s live.
Account Discovery helps marketers understand engagement across an account and its buying committee, including where important roles may be missing.
When inbound intent appears, Piper can answer questions, qualify interest, and book the meeting in the moment. Hunter carries that context forward to sales, helping reps prepare, personalize outreach, and move the opportunity forward.
Marketing and sales stay connected around the same buyer context, instead of losing it in the handoff.
We’re already seeing the impact at Salesforce. Piper engages visitors around the clock and in any language, freeing SDRs to focus on more strategic selling. Conversion rates have reached roughly twice their previous level.
5. Connect marketing across every surface
Marketing work no longer happens in one application. Marketers move across Salesforce, content platforms, analytics tools, Slack, AI assistants, and custom experiences. Agents increasingly will too.
Headless Marketing with AIforce brings Marketing Cloud into those environments, so marketers can work from the surface and agent they choose without losing the context behind the work.
That could mean updating content, building an automation, exploring data, or managing a journey directly from the tools where the work started, instead of switching back into Marketing Cloud for every task.
MCP servers make that possible by securely connecting AI agents to Marketing Cloud capabilities, data, and workflows. The work stays grounded in Salesforce context, permissions, and governance.
Looking to get started with Headless? Check out the guide.
A new model for marketing growth
Marketing has always been about turning strategy into growth. What’s changing is how much of that strategy can now be carried forward by agents.
With Marketing Cloud, marketers set the goals, strategy, and guardrails. Agents help act on them across the moments where customers discover, decide, and engage.
That means more of your strategy can keep working, even when you can’t manually manage every decision behind it.
