Salesforce acquires Informatica to strengthen its AI data infrastructure

As part of its strategic acquisition of Informatica, Salesforce announced it will build a unified data foundation to support intelligent AI implementation, and clarified the division of responsibilities between Informatica and its existing integration platform, MuleSoft. This launch aims to address long-standing challenges in AI applications, such as fragmented enterprise data and lack of business context, and can be seen as a decision by Salesforce to leverage Informatica’s technology for delivering deep enterprise context capabilities.

Rahul Auradkar, Senior Vice President in charge of Data360 and AI infrastructure at Salesforce, pointed out: “AI models may possess all the world’s knowledge, but they uniquely lack an understanding of the specific context of an enterprise.” He emphasized that without a unified understanding of enterprise data, AI would have to rely on “guesswork.” Therefore, Informatica will play a core role in building a semantic data structure spanning the entire enterprise, providing trusted context.

Krish Vitaldevara, Informatica’s Chief Product Officer, also noted that data fragmentation, poor quality, and insufficient context are the main reasons for AI project failures, stating that “context is the key to transforming raw data into substantive information.” He highlighted that Informatica’s AI-powered real-time engine processes over 1.4 quadrillion metadata records per month, offering neutrality and scalability across cloud and on-premises environments.

Salesforce explained that Informatica will be responsible for enterprise-wide Master Data Management (MDM), while MuleSoft will focus on providing real-time event signals. Moving forward, the two platforms will collaborate via Salesforce’s unified “Data360” architecture, working together on a metadata-driven basis. This will enable consistent data understanding across products, assets, customers, transactions, regions, suppliers, and more—laying the foundation for AI to make reasoning-based decisions.

The effectiveness of this integration has already been validated. Salesforce revealed that by leveraging Informatica, MuleSoft, and Data360 to organize its internal sales and product account data, it successfully reduced tax adjustment cases by 98% and cut duplicate accounts by 20%.

The integration roadmap between both parties has also become more specific. In the future, Informatica’s metadata and MDM records will auto-sync into Salesforce systems without additional coding, and both sides will jointly establish data governance and AI-appropriate access control standards. Notably, the goal is to enhance data security through features such as attribute-based access control, data masking, and lineage tracing.

Vitaldevara reiterated: “We pride ourselves on being the ‘Switzerland’ of data, and we will also be the ‘Switzerland’ of AI in the future,” confirming the commitment to technical neutrality and broad compatibility. As Salesforce’s data strategy evolves toward agent-based AI, Informatica’s role has moved beyond a simple acquisition target and is now being positioned as essential infrastructure for the AI era.