Salesforce pushes harder into enterprise data with Informatica, betting it will turbocharge AI growth

Salesforce is betting that the next leg of its AI strategy depends less on new models and more on the plumbing that makes corporate data usable. In recent commentary around its latest results, the company pointed to its Informatica acquisition as a way to strengthen how it governs, integrates, and prepares data for AI workflows tied to Agentforce, its agentic automation platform.

Informatica is designed for enterprise data integration and management, including capabilities around governance, data quality, and metadata. The business aim is straightforward: if AI agents are going to make reliable decisions, they need “trusted” data. Integrating Informatica into Salesforce’s Data 360 platform, and combining it with Agentforce and other Data 360 components, is intended to make customer data more accurate and easier to operationalize, expanding what Salesforce can sell alongside its core CRM software.

The integration is already showing up in how Salesforce is framing its revenue momentum. During the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Salesforce reported that combined AI and data annual recurring revenues, including Agentforce, Data 360, and Informatica Cloud, reached $3.4 billion. Management characterized that as a 200% year-over-year increase, and said Informatica’s business contributed to revenue outperformance while revenue synergies began to emerge following the acquisition.

Salesforce’s broader quarterly performance also provided the backdrop for the pitch. The company said revenues rose 13% year over year to $11.13 billion, while current remaining performance obligations, a measure of expected future revenue tied to contracts, increased about 14% to $33.6 billion. Encouraged by the quarter, Salesforce raised the lower end of its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to a range of $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion.

The push matters because enterprise AI spending is increasingly constrained by data readiness. Many businesses have fragmented systems, inconsistent identifiers, and incomplete metadata, all of which can degrade AI output. By expanding Data 360 with Informatica’s integration and governance toolset, Salesforce appears to be positioning itself not only as an AI application vendor, but also as an end-to-end platform for building AI-powered business workflows on top of cleaner data foundations.

Salesforce’s effort also creates a commercial pathway for cross-selling. The reported thesis is that existing CRM customers, already paying for core sales, service, and platform tools, can add enterprise-grade data integration and governance services as they move toward AI-driven processes. In other words, Salesforce is trying to turn a common customer problem, “we cannot trust or operationalize our data,” into incremental demand for additional platform components.

Still, some details remain unclear. The company did not provide, in the referenced reporting, a breakdown of Informatica’s standalone revenue trend after acquisition, specific contract volumes tied to Data 360 deployments, or how quickly Informatica features are being absorbed by CRM installed base. It also did not quantify the size of the expected long-term impact from “synergies,” beyond management’s early commentary that they are starting to show up.

What to watch next is whether Salesforce can sustain the AI-and-data ARR growth rate as the integration matures, and whether fiscal 2027 guidance continues to reflect expanding contributions from the combined Data 360 and Informatica stack. Investors and customers will likely look for clearer disclosures on usage adoption across governance, data quality, and metadata management, and whether those capabilities translate into renewed platform purchasing beyond one-time refresh cycles.