Salesforce’s Agentic AI Ambition Meets Data Access Backlash

Salesforce wants to automate the modern marketing team while keeping tighter control over the data that fuels it.

In its latest push into generative AI, the cloud software giant has rolled out Marketing Cloud Next, a suite of tools powered by autonomous AI agents that handle everything from campaign strategy to execution. These agents create audience segments, draft email and SMS copy, personalize website content in real time, and monitor ad performance—tweaking spend or messaging as needed, without human intervention.

The pitch is simple: let AI do the grunt work, so marketing teams can move faster and focus on strategy. “We’re going to see cost savings if we’re putting more of the segmentation decisions on AI and being more narrow in our targeting,” said Ariel Kelman, President and CMO of Salesforce. “If we can speed up the process of going from an idea to executing it, then the CMOs can say no less often.”

But the company’s simultaneous clampdown on data usage—especially inside Slack—is raising concerns across the enterprise software industry. Just weeks before launching its flagship AI product, Salesforce quietly revised Slack’s data usage policies to prohibit customers from training external AI models on their own Slack data. It also restricted third-party applications to only temporary access windows, limiting how external tools like Glean, an enterprise search startup can retrieve and work with customer-owned data.