by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 1, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On June 25, Creatio announced the launch of version 8.3 of its platform, dubbed as the “Twin release”. The release features new prebuilt role-based AI agents, a unified conversational interface, and AI-powered no-code development tools. These new capabilities are natively embedded into the core of the platform. According to Creatio, the “Twin” release reflects the company’s vision of AI as a collaborative force within the enterprise. Katherine Kostereva, CEO at Creatio, stated, “Our approach is human-centric. With this release, we continue to expand our AI-native platform, placing unified, actionable, and composable AI automation at the very core of Creatio. The 8.3 release takes our AI automation to a new level, empowering organizations to transform processes and deliver results like never before.” Key innovations in this release include Natively Embedded AI and a Unified Conversational Interface: The 8.3 “Twin” Release advances Creatio’s AI-native strategy by embedding Creatio’s AI deeper into and across every layer of the platform. Creatio.ai is designed to power real-time automation, provide grounded recommendations, and offer a seamless natural language experience. Users can now interact with Creatio using natural language as the default mode through a refreshed, AI-optimized interface. The assistant utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide responses based on company-specific context. These conversational capabilities are natively available across Creatio’s web and mobile applications, as well as within productivity tools such as MS Outlook and MS Teams. Prebuilt, Role-Based AI Agents: The release introduces new prebuilt, role-based AI agents that cover sales, service, marketing and development. These agents are designed to help employees and customers achieve business results faster. AI-Powered No-Code Development: Creatio 8.3 enhances...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 28, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On June 23, 2025, Salesforce announced Agentforce 3, the third iteration of its Agentforce platform. Agentforce 3 is a major upgrade to Salesforce’s digital labor platform. It gives customers the visibility and control that is needed to scale AI agents that already have proven useful at many companies. The release covers several additional capabilities. Salesforce has introduced the Agentforce Command Center, an observability console designed for managing AI agents. This tool allows businesses to track and scale AI agent activities. It is built into Agentforce Studio and includes features for monitoring performance metrics such as latency and error rates through live analytics. The update also brings native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables Agentforce to connect with any MCP-compliant server without requiring custom coding. The platform’s Atlas architecture has been enhanced to improve latency, accuracy, and resiliency. Support for additional Large Language Models has been added, including Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet via Amazon Bedrock, with future support planned for Google Gemini. Agentforce 3 includes over 200 pre-built industry actions, with half of these being new additions. The agents are now capable of performing web searches and providing citations for the information they retrieve. The platform’s availability has been expanded to Canada, the U.K., India, Japan, and Brazil, adding support for six new languages. More than 30 new partners have been added to the AgentExchange marketplace. These include companies such as AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM, PayPal, and Stripe. Salesforce has also introduced new pricing options, including per-user plans for its Sales, Service, and Industry Clouds that provide unlimited usage of actions for employee-facing agents....
by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 5, 2025 | Blog |
In the past few years, I have written about CDPs, what they are and what their value is – or rather can be. My definition of a CDP that I laid out in one of my column articles on CustomerThink is: A Customer Data Platform is a software that creates persistent, unified customer records that enable business processesthat have the customers’ interests and objectives in mind. It is a good thing that CDPs evolved from its origins of being a packaged software owned by marketers, serving marketers. Having looked at CDP’s as a band aid that fixes the proliferation of data silos that emerged for a number of reasons, I have ultimately come to the conclusion and am here to say that the customer data platform as an entity is increasingly becoming irrelevant – or in the typical marketing hyperbole – dead. Why is that? There are mainly four reasons for it. For one, many an application has its own CDP variant already embedded as part of enabling its core functionality. Any engagement solution that is worth a grain of salt needs the analytical capabilities that a CDP offers, and hence offers them itself. Why do the additional investment of buying things that one already has once more? This only increases cost and IT landscape complexity while acquiring capabilities that partially are already available. In addition, there is no real and concise definition anymore, with even the CDP Institute differentiating use types and/or scopes of CDPs. If you are looking at what other vendors (Salesforce, Oracle) or analysts (here: Gartner) are saying, the water becomes even more muddy. The...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 3, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
The past weeks certainly brought a lot of news, with SAP Sapphire and Salesforce’s surely strategically timed announcement of acquiring Informatica, ranging at the top. I have covered both in recent articles. The enterprise software landscape is crackling with energy, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly the star of the show. It isn’t anymore about AI as a mere feature; it’s about AI as the strategic core of enterprise software. Two recent announcements underscored this shift: SAP’s ambitious AI-centric vision that was unveiled at its Sapphire 2025 conference, and, arriving hot on its heels, Salesforce’s agreement to acquire data management titan Informatica for $8 billion. Both signal an intensified battle for AI supremacy, where trusted, enterprise-wide data is the undisputed new monarch. Of course, SAP and Salesforce are not the only ones duking this one out. SAP’s Sapphire Vision: An AI-Powered, Integrated Enterprise At its Sapphire 2025 event in Orlando, SAP laid out a sweeping vision for an AI-driven future. The central themes resonating from Sapphire were “AI everywhere” and “the AI flywheel”, with intelligence deeply woven into its integrated suite of applications and powered by the SAP Business Data Cloud as a strong, unified data layer. Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, is slated to become “omnipresent,” extending its reach not only across the entire SAP ecosystem but also into third-party applications. It’s designed to proactively assist users and launch autonomous “Joule Agents” to automate a wide array of workflows. SAP has ambitious plans to significantly expand its library of these specialized agents. Underpinning this is the SAP AI Foundation that includes Joule Studio for agent development, a Knowledge Graph...
by Thomas Wieberneit | May 27, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On May 27, 2025, Salesforce announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica for about $8bn. According to the press release, “bringing together Informatica’s cloud-native capabilities — including its extensive data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and MDM — with the Salesforce platform will unlock new capabilities for Salesforce’s enterprise data stack, delivering a complete solution to the challenges of AI at scale”. The acquisition is planned to enhance Salesforce’ data foundation which is critical for deploying agentic AI. “The combination of Informatica’s rich data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services with the Salesforce platform will establish a unified architecture for agentic AI — enabling AI agents to operate safely, responsibly, and at scale across the modern enterprise”. The bigger picture For agentic AI systems – or agents in general – to operate efficiently, it needs two things: data and data. Data from a vendor’s own systems as well as data from external systems that can get harmonized and accessed/used by the software agents. SAP during its annual Sapphire event just made exactly this point by showcasing how its Joule family of agents can use data from SAP and non-SAP applications. As there is no vendor to rule them all (thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien for this inspiration) there is an importance on again two things: (zero copy) data integration and data management including its governance. These seemingly not-so-sexy capabilities are sorely lacked by many application vendors but, again, thanks to AI, increasingly necessary. Again, AI, especially autonomous AI systems, cannot be...
