Marketing Intelligence: The New Agentforce-Powered Analytics Tool

On 18 March, Salesforce launched a new marketing analytics tool called Marketing Intelligence. The move follows Salesforce’s new portfolio strategy of consolidating previously acquired capabilities on top of the Core Platform, extended by Data Cloud and Agentforce. It is important to note that Marketing Intelligence is an entirely new, Salesforce-built tool that shouldn’t be confused with existing platforms, like Marketing Cloud Intelligence, CRM Analytics, and Tableau. 

Marketing Intelligence is a response to a demand in the market for unified analytics. According to Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report 2024, marketers have made strides in breaking silos and gaining better visibility over the sales pipeline; now the focus is on end-to-end attribution and ROMI. Thus far, the problem has been that proper attribution has been difficult with disconnected third-party and first-party data sources, and has required extensive manual work – a situation that Marketing Intelligence hopes to change. 

In this article, we trace back to the origins of Salesforce’s analytics domain, how Marketing Intelligence fits into the bigger picture, and what you should know about the new tool.

Timeline of Salesforce Analytics Solutions

Most people don’t associate Salesforce with analytics. First and foremost, it remains the number one customer data and AI company, and provider of the world’s leading CRM system. However, analytics has always been part of the picture for Salesforce in one form or another starting with its standard reports and dashboards. Over the last 10 years, Salesforce has been building up its analytical powers both in-house and through acquisitions. 

To get an overview of Salesforce’s analytics capabilities, see the timeline below…

CRM Analytics

• Salesforce Analytics Cloud: Launched in 2014.
• Wave Analytics: Renamed shortly after its launch.
• Einstein Analytics: Rebranded in 2017 to emphasize the integration of AI capabilities.
• B2B Marketing Analytics: Released in 2018 as an add-on for Account Engagement (Pardot) customers.
• Tableau CRM: Renamed in 2020 following Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau.
• B2B Marketing Analytics Plus: Released in 2020 as a more robust version of the add-on with predictive (Einstein) capabilities.
• CRM Analytics: The most recent renaming in 2022 to better align with its core CRM functionalities.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence

• Datorama: Launched in 2012, acquired by Salesforce in 2018.
• Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud: Launched in 2021 to enable users to generate, view, and share detailed analyses of their marketing data.
• Marketing Cloud Intelligence: Renamed in 2022, following a slew of product renamings aimed at simplifying the Marketing Cloud offering.

Tableau

• Tableau: Founded in 2003.
• Tableau Desktop: First version released in 2005.
• Tableau Public: Launched in 2010 as a free platform allowing users to create and share interactive data visualizations online.
• Tableau Online: Launched in 2013 as a SaaS platform, following the company becoming publicly traded.
• Tableau from Salesforce: Acquired in 2019 by Salesforce. Salesforce kept the platform as a standalone solution like Slack while incorporating its core architecture into its own CRM Analytics and building native integrations to its CRM and other platforms.
• Tableau Cloud: A reintroduction of Tableau Online launched in 2022 with new features and updates.
• Tableau Next: Launched in 2025 as a new analytics tool using Tableau functionalities, built on Salesforce Core Platform, and leveraging Data Cloud and Agentforce.

Key Capabilities of Marketing Intelligence

Marketing Intelligence represents a new analytics platform for the agentic age, shifting the time used for report building and technical configuration – tasks that used to consume much of the analysts’ time – to planning and decision-making. 

It does this by leveraging features that Salesforce have built on top of their Core Platform over the years, such as generative and predictive AI, and high-performance data processing. Marketing Intelligence takes these existing capabilities and expands upon them with the following enhancements.

Built on Salesforce Core Architecture

Marketing Intelligence marries together the performance of Hyperforce, data ingestion and unification of Data Cloud, AI capabilities of Agentforce, and the visualizations of Tableau Next. The result is a modern user experience that is highly adaptable and easily extendable by ecosystem partners. 

Previous iterations of embedded analytics dashboards have had their issues in terms of usability, reliability, and security. Meanwhile, running analytics on the Core Platform also means being able to surface insights within the same platform without friction. This in turn makes cross-functional collaboration significantly smoother.

Easy Data Ingestion With Data Pipelines

Mapping external data sources with Data Cloud comes with a fair share of pitfalls. Luckily, Marketing Intelligence has a streamlined approach to ingesting third-party data: a feature called Data Pipelines. You could think of Data Pipelines as a tailored version of data mapping that is built with marketing analytics requirements in mind. 

This is important since Data Cloud and Marketing Intelligence have a very different viewpoint on data. Data Cloud centers everything around the individual, whereas Marketing Intelligence is all about campaigns. Data Pipelines make it quick and easy to incorporate new data sources using a marketing-specific data model on the Salesforce Semantic Layer.

Combine Paid Media With CRM Data

Marketing Intelligence brings new ways of connecting third-party data sources to existing data in Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud. This means that you gain a 360° view of your campaigns, all the way from social ads and SEM to targeted emails and event marketing. 

It has out-of-the-box connectors for major advertising platforms, such as Meta and Google Ads (coming during FY26), that automatically map to the Marketing Intelligence data model. For those data sources without a prebuilt API connector, the platform’s Total Connect functionality recommends a template to automatically map metrics and dimensions based on data type, leaving you to manually map missing fields, if necessary.

Automatic AI-Driven Data Enrichment

Whether you use a prebuilt connector or Total Connect, data sources may not include all the attributes you need. Marketing Intelligence uses generative AI to fill in blanks and add new dimensions to your data streams.

Additionally, you can set up patterns, such as a unified campaign naming convention or a product name hierarchy, that automatically extract attributes from UTM tags and ad campaign names. This speeds up data harmonization considerably and provides a more holistic view of campaign performance.

Generate Reports With Words, Not Clicks

Powered by Agentforce, Marketing Intelligence has extensive prompting capabilities, allowing you to verbalize your requirements and have the platform build the dashboards on your behalf. By using natural language, you can have AI generate summaries and goal dashboards to evaluate overall program health. You can also let Agentforce optimize ad spend by automatically identifying and pausing under-performing ads.

Finally, you have a multitude of out-of-the-box dashboards for monitoring marketing goals and performance at the channel, campaign, and aggregate levels.

Built-In Attribution and ROMI Modeling

Once thought of as the holy grail of marketing analytics, end-to-end attribution is one of the key selling points of Marketing Intelligence. Previously, analytics platforms have focused strongly on either first-party or third-party data sources, forming an incomplete view of performance at best. 

Marketing Intelligence has the full range of paid and organic marketing actions coupled with customer and sales funnel insights originating from Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud. Having all these pieces in place means that Marketing Intelligence is able to provide you with marketing attribution and ROMI by following just a handful of guided steps in Salesforce Setup. Follow the steps once, and you’re all set to track how your precious marketing spend impacts the bottom line!

Actionable Insights

One pain point in marketing analytics has been the disconnect between insights and action. A marketing dashboard might show high and low performers, and even highlight ad campaigns needing more budget, but you would usually have to log in to a separate platform to make those adjustments. 

Marketing Intelligence has connectors that allow you to make ad orchestration directly from Salesforce. When you see an ad requiring adjustments, you can click on it and have Marketing Intelligence run the action all the way to the ad platform itself.

Open Questions

As with any product launch, there are as many questions in the air as there are answers. An obvious question is of course, how much does it cost? So far, we know that the pricing is consumption-based, as is the case with Data Cloud. However, the big question is how the vast amounts of third-party data will be handled in an economical way. 

We know from past experience with Marketing Cloud Intelligence, that event-based data in particular (e.g. events from Google Analytics 4) can cause an explosion in data row consumption. It is unclear if Data Pipelines get their credit consumption tier, but such a thing would be important to avoid prohibitively high credit consumption when ingesting advertising or web analytics data.

Current users of CRM Analytics or Marketing Cloud Intelligence may wonder how this new product impacts their current usage. The simple answer, at least in the short term is: it doesn’t. Your current license agreements are by default not impacted at all. That said, Salesforce have hinted at possible free trials and a zero-dollar SKU, like they released for Data Cloud. Having both the existing platform and Marketing Intelligence active side-by-side would allow users to more freely explore the differences between the two. This would make for a smoother transition from the “legacy” analytics platforms to the new one.

Another open question is the future of the previous Salesforce analytics platforms. As of now, no end-of-sale or end-of-life has been declared, and Salesforce have stated that they will continue to sell, support, and update these platforms until stated otherwise. If this is the case, users of existing analytics solutions would continue to get updates with the normal release cycle. 

Typically, Salesforce sunsets its products in a controlled manner, starting with an end-of-sale and two/three-year timeframe before ending support. This means that current analytics users have at least a few years before their platforms start to sunset; plenty of time to plan for the future.

Final Thoughts

Salesforce has launched Marketing Intelligence, a new analytics tool built for the Agentforce era. It aims to unify data for better end-to-end attribution and ROMI, integrating third-party data sources with Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud. 

While it offers features like AI-driven data enrichment and natural language report generation, concerns remain about its consumption-based pricing model and how it will handle the large volume of third-party data without becoming unreasonably expensive. Additionally, while Marketing Intelligence boasts impressive features, it’s uncertain whether all these capabilities will be fully available at launch, or if the platform will require more time to mature into a viable solution. 

As with any new product, potential users should weigh these factors carefully before making a commitment.