Guide to Education Cloud

An education cloud is a comprehensive technology platform designed specifically for the needs of higher education and K-12 institutions. It moves beyond traditional, siloed systems, providing a single, unified view of every learner, from prospective student to alum. This kind of platform is often purpose-built with data models, agents, and business processes tailored for the education sector.

It serves as a central hub where faculty and staff can manage key areas of the learner lifecycle, including recruitment and admissions, student success , academic operations, and advancement. By connecting disparate data sources into a single view, an education cloud transforms manual workflows and reactive support into real-time insights and proactive support that ultimately builds learner relationships for life. This unification empowers teams to scale their impact and helps institutions become more agile.

Salesforce Education Cloud , now known as Agentforce Education, is a deeply unified platform that empowers institutions to connect the entire learner journey. It is built on the trusted Salesforce platform and is designed to drive learner and institution success by leveraging data, apps, and agents in one place. This technology suite provides purpose-built tools for the education industry, including a specialized data model and industry business processes. With Education Cloud, institutions can:

• Unify data and take action on one, leaner-centric platform
• Accelerate institution-wide impact with a common capabilities model
• Eliminate the need to DIY their AI with 20+ agentic workflows built for education

The platform helps educational institutions deliver lifelong value and maximize outcomes across all phases of a learner’s relationship with their institution. Education Cloud capabilities support recruitment and admissions, student success, academic operations, and advancement and alumni relations. Education Cloud also empowers institutions to get started with AI quickly with purpose-built industry agents designed to help scale staff and deliver 24/7, trusted support to students when they need it most.

Only Education Cloud brings together learner-centric CRM, SIS, and AI capabilities on a deeply unified platform. Institutions that adopt Education Cloud can realize several key benefits including:

Education Cloud accelerates time to value, especially when compared to legacy point solutions. With out of the box features, such as application portal templates, set up time is significantly reduced for institutions. Automations, an alerts framework, and a data processing engine also reduce the need for manual work flows and eliminate time lost to stitching data together across multiple systems. Salesforce’s unrivaled partner ecosystem and trailblazer community are also integral to helping institutions get up and running faster.

Education Cloud is infused with purpose-built agents to support your learners, faculty, and staff. This includes agents for Advising Support, Philanthropic Research, Student Recruitment and more. We’ve also introduced over 20 workflows, including topics, actions, and flows, so you can easily and securely configure agents that meet your institution’s most pressing needs in no time. And with our deeply unified platform approach, your AI agents are never operating in silos. We’re continuing to launch new agents on Education Cloud to increase staff efficiency and deliver the 24/7 support students expect throughout their education journey.

We consistently hear from the education institutions we serve that today’s SIS, with roots in academic record-keeping and HR, is slow to innovate, expensive to maintain, and very difficult to replace. That’s why Salesforce is embarking on a transformative journey to build a next-generation student information system (SIS) on Education Cloud. Education Cloud moves the traditional SIS from a transactional system to a next-generation, learner-centered, AI-powered system. This transformation streamlines critical student processes like course registration and managing holds and blocks. By building modular, learner-centric SIS capabilities and releasing them over time, Salesforce offers institutions a more flexible path to embracing a modern system.

Education Cloud includes pre-built modules for Recruitment & Admissions, Student Success, Academic Operations and Advancement and Alumni Relations to support the entire lifelong learning journey - all on one platform. With three releases a year, our dedicated product team works directly with customers to identify key pain points and build new features that deliver impactful results. With purpose-built agents, tailored analytics, and automation to support each phase of the education journey, every Education Cloud module is built to make it easy for staff to unify data and take action all in one place.

Education Cloud provides customers with the latest innovations across the entire Salesforce platform - including Agentforce, Slack, Tableau and more - in addition to purpose-built solutions designed just for the needs of institutions. This dual impact approach enables institutions to reap the benefits of the #1 CRM faster across campus when compared to legacy technology where excess time and money is often spent on maintenance, training, and integration costs. This is especially pertinent when considering the cost of replatforming when individual point solutions need to be ripped/replaced vs having an integrated CRM platform approach.

Education Cloud is built on a trusted Education Data Foundation that unifies and activates all institutional data. This enables institutions to become an AI-powered connected campus. Our education-specific objects for things like grades and courses live as native objects on the core Salesforce platform enabling you to get started with Salesforce even faster.

The centerpiece of Education Cloud is a Common Capability Model. This capability model allows for common services, such as appointment scheduling and application forms, to be used institution-wide and across departments, enabling your faculty and staff to maximize their impact across campus. Education Cloud also includes pre-built modules for Recruitment & Admissions, Student Success, Academic Operations, and Advancement and Alumni Relations to truly support the entire lifelong learning journey.

Here’s a closer look at how Education Cloud works through a series of key steps:

• Unify Disparate Data: Data from siloed systems—such as an SIS, LMS, marketing tools, or various apps —is brought together and unified on Education Cloud providing a holistic view of the student and course insights. This unification is critical for leveraging the full power of the platform.
• Activate Data with AI: The platform uses this unified data, along with purpose-built AI and data models, to gain real-time insights and turn conversations into action. This allows staff to ask more of their data and scale their impact with helpful AI-driven summaries, recommended next steps, and critical reporting insights that unlock the why behind key data trends.
• Drive Agentic Workflows: Education Cloud offers numerous agentic workflows tailored for the education sector. These purpose-built agents are orchestrated across the entire institution and can assist in key areas including student recruitment , advising support, and philanthropic research.
• Support the Lifelong Learner Journey: Education Cloud’s purpose-built agents connect all phases of the learner lifecycle—from prospective student inquiry support and initial application creation to generating helpful advisor summaries and providing proactive philanthropic research for advancement teams .
• Create Personalized Experiences at Scale: By providing a deep context of every prospective student, learner, and alum Education Cloud empowers institutions to provide tailored guidance and personalized engagement at scale creating a truly connected education experience at every step. This helps institutions deliver customized support and foster learner relationships for life.

Education Cloud includes purpose-built features and agents that support the entire learner lifecycle and operational needs of an institution. Some examples include:

• Advising Support Agent (GA): Generates comprehensive student summaries of key advising details, helps identify best-fit resources to deliver proactive student support, and automates next steps.
• Philanthropic Research Agent (GA): Surfaces key alumni and donor insights fast with insightful research summaries and assessments that highlight philanthropic interests, upcoming wealth transfers, wealth capacity and more.
• Student Recruitment Agent (Beta): Answers prospective students’ questions 24/7, captures academic interest, registers students for campus tours, and helps start their application.
• Student Goals Agent (Beta): Helps students achieve career and life goals with AI-powered recommendations.
• Next-Generation SIS Capabilities: Education Cloud offers modern Student Information System features, including holds & blocks automation, registration windows, and custom SIS rules to help keep students on track.
• Advancement Tools for Next Generation Giving: Advancement staff can prioritize requests, easily generate research profiles using AI, and track indicators and assessments. They can also model complex gifts, calculate projections, and visualize gift structures.

Education Cloud supports institutions across their core functional areas, making a direct impact on outcomes throughout the entire education journey, including:

Institutions use Education Cloud to manage the entire enrollment funnel from prospective student engagement and the applicant experience to comprehensive application reviews and decisioning. Education Cloud includes tools for managing different applicant types — whether undergraduate, postgraduate, or lifelong learners. Features like the Student Recruitment Agent provide 24/7 AI-based support, while the Dynamic Application Wizard adapts to each user’s context. Staff can manage workloads with review workflows, scoring rubrics, and automated scheduling, while third-party users like parents or agents can access secure portals. Features like Campus and Program Finder empower students to easily browse, search and filter campuses and programs by locations, majors, grade level, and more. This unified approach helps institutions boost enrollment and manage opportunities efficiently.

Education Cloud supports key areas of student success — including advising, wellbeing monitoring, and academic planning. It brings together information that staff need to proactively support students, while giving learners tools to manage their journey. Institutions can use Pulse Checks to monitor wellbeing, create Action Plans, and assign tailored support using the Advising Console. The Visual Degree Planner helps students track their academic path, and helpful automation powers alerts, outreach, and team assignments based on real-time data. The Advising Support Agent generates comprehensive student summaries of key advising details and helps identify best-fit resources to deliver proactive student support at scale. These tools ultimately contribute to better student outcomes and retention.

Institutions use Education Cloud to manage the entire advancement lifecycle — from identifying potential donors and cultivating relationships, to processing gifts and stewarding ongoing support. Fundraisers can track each stage of a relationship with tools for donor timelines, activity history, prospect scoring, and task management. Gift processing teams can manage pledges, recurring gifts, soft credits, and fund designations in one place — reducing administrative complexity and improving data accuracy. For alumni relations, Education Cloud supports tracking of engagement history, interests, and affiliations — giving teams the ability to tailor outreach and maintain stronger connections over time. Plus, the new Philanthropic Research Agent surfaces key alumni and donor insights fast with insightful research summaries and assessments that highlight philanthropic interests, upcoming wealth transfers, wealth capacity and more.

Embrace the future of education with an AI-powered connected campus. Institutions can achieve new levels of efficiency, agility, and connection by adopting the purpose-built tools of Education Cloud, now known as Agentforce Education. Start your journey to scale personalized learner experiences and drive institutional success today.