Salesforce’s latest AI bid: targeting customers with real-time data

Salesforce wants to know what you’re doing right now—and why you’re doing it.

This month it signed an approximately $5.7 billion agreement to acquire Braze, an engagement platform that allows brands to track and respond to customer behavior in real time. Industry pros say it’s the company’s latest effort to personalize its user experience, shaping content based on what people (and agents) are already browsing for and buying. The acquisition comes in the midst of an expansion for the company’s Agentforce platform—its high-profile move into the world of agentic-powered hyperpersonalization—and as Salesforce battles economic and competitor headwinds.

The AI era is also shifting the customer retention playbook and has made it possible for companies to gather increasingly personal information about fly-by and loyal users.

“The acquisition of Braze brings into Salesforce all of this data around consumer preferences and this control of the backend pipeline that they can then use to expose more effectively to the agentic economy,” said Jeff Bussgang, general partner and co-founder at Flybridge Capital Partners and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

Real-time selling point

Not only can AI-infused tech help industry leaders like Salesforce better understand their customer base, but it allows GTM teams to mark prospects based on their current scrolling and spending behavior, rather than relying on historical patterns. Companies like Clay are already at the forefront of this intent signal targeting, tracking potential clients online and using the results to automate outreach. Bussgang said that strategy now applies to both human clients and agents employed with specific tasks.

“Brands, websites, marketing funnels need to be agent friendly,” he said. “It also means that they want to collect data and transactional information about people’s preferences and agents’ preferences.”

Acquiring Braze is one of Salesforce’s bids to maintain its position in an industry where information is a valuable commodity and “AI is raising the bar for marketers,” as the company put it in the deal announcement. Braze’s tech gives sellers details about whether a customer is more likely to purchase kitchen utensils over home decor, for example, or open a text message versus an email. From an outbound sequencing perspective, the brand can then react with an immediate, tailored message to prospects on their preferred platforms. Did the shoes they clicked on yesterday go on sale? They might get a push notification. It’s a much more granular, information-age version of the personalized sales script.

The engagement platform—which was founded under the name Appboy in 2011—has more than 2,700 active customers, including brands like Dairy Queen, Equinox, Instacart, and Venmo.

Christina O’Reilly, chief marketing officer at the social media marketing firm Hootsuite, said the Braze news could be a reflection of larger trends in the marketing and sales industries.

“In this moment, audiences’ expectations are evolving,” she said. “People are expecting brands to really understand the context of their conversations, the context of their lives, and not just deliver generic responses.”

It starts with data

The acquisition is the latest in a slew of Salesforce deals focused on AI-powered business and customer research. The company recently absorbed data and analytics firms like Listen Labs, Fin, and Loops.

Beyond those deals, the company is emphasizing headless architecture—a tech practice which it describes as allowing developers to separate the front-end customer experience from the backend data and business logic. Bussgang said it’s another avenue for Salesforce to customize its offerings.

The moves also come at a time when speciality software skills are evolving into something most employees can achieve through vibe coding, which Bussgang said makes Salesforce’s traditional per-seat business model less attractive to clients—a trend investors have called the SaaSpocalypse.

Rethinking pricing and engagement strategies for the AI era will take time and money. But Salesforce’s deal for Braze is another sign the status quo won’t cut it for SaaS companies in the long term. Hypertargeted audience data may be the new hottest tool to lure new customers and keep existing ones hooked.

“In the past, SaaS companies have looked at their ideal client profile as bits of static information: demographics or sociographics, maybe even a bit of psychographics,” said Ed Valdez, chief AI and marketing officer and a partner at Chief Outsiders. “What AI and companies like Braze will give Salesforce the opportunity to do is factor in behavioral changes.”