What Is Data Cloud?

Data Cloud is a hyperscale data engine inside Salesforce that serves as the trusted foundation of Customer 360 and Agentforce. It unifies all your structured and unstructured data into a single, trusted customer view, natively integrated with Salesforce. Data Cloud enhances Agentforce by grounding agents in proprietary data and enabling automation through data-triggered workflows, advanced analytics, and AI-powered applications. With both low-code and pro-code tools, it empowers your entire organization to access and act on data, fostering self-service, informed decision-making, and innovation across teams.

Data Cloud breaks down data silos by unifying all your data,giving every team a 360-degree view that your enterprise can access and take action on. This holistic customer view is made possible by turning volumes of disconnected data into a single, trusted model that’s easy to access and understand. Imagine being able to unify diverse datasets, like telemetry data, web engagement data, and all kinds of unstructured data (text documents, emails, socal media, images) across your organization or your external data lakes and warehouses. That’s what Data Cloud makes possible. And this unified view helps your Sales, Service, and Marketing teams — and their AI agents, build personalized customer experiences, trigger data-driven actions and workflows, and safely drive AI across all of your Salesforce apps.

Regardless of where your data comes from — internal apps, systems, channels, external data lakes, and even emails, images, or PDFs — Data Cloud can bring it all together, creating a unified customer profile that helps your team better understand what your customer needs today, and anticipate what they may need tomorrow. This helps teams across your organization use all of your company’s data to boost productivity and deliver deeper customer value.

Using Data Cloud, your business can consistently provide personalized customer experiences that lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth. Data Cloud ensures that every employee has the right information at the right time to deliver what customers need, in near real-time, across the entire customer journey.

Data is now the heart of business. With the rise of agentic AI and generative AI, data is more crucial than ever. Clean, integrated, and contextual data is what deepens the understanding of our customers.

Despite this, 94% of business leaders feel they’re not getting enough value from their data, and only 39% believe they’re turning data insights into a real competitive edge. The problem? Complex data strategies. Most companies use over 1,000 applications yet 70% are disconnected, leading to massive, tangled data ecosystems. While these systems centralize data, they often fail to make it actionable in everyday workflows, resulting in poor customer experiences.

Enter Data Cloud. It’s designed to simplify data activation by connecting all your data sources, warehouses, and lakes directly into the applications and workflows your teams use daily. By integrating data into Salesforce’s metadata framework, business teams can easily act on information that lives both within and outside of Salesforce, driving endless use cases to boost customer satisfaction and business operations.

With Data Cloud, you can unlock the full potential of your data and prepare for the AI revolution. By grounding AI in your own data, you ensure accurate, tailored results. This is essential in the age of AI, where data is the key to predictive and generative AI success. Data Cloud makes data accessible and actionable, enabling faster, more informed decisions that benefit your customers.

Historically, customer data platforms (CDPs) have been a solution used primarily by marketing teams. Data Cloud, however, is deeply integrated with Salesforce and its metadata framework.This ensures your entire workforce, both humans and AI agents, across all lines of business, gain a trusted foundation of unified customer data native to Salesforce.

That foundation is built by bringing structured and unstructured data from any source, including all kinds of data previously trapped in data lakes and warehouses — into Salesforce where it can be used to power automation, analytics, customer personalization and more. Zero-copy integrations allow seamless connections to top platforms like Snowflake or Databricks — without the need to move or copy data.This means you can more easily use all their data that lives outside of Salesforce within everyday apps, like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, without having to invest in and maintain messy, expensive data pipelines.

Data Cloud lets your bring all your data into the Salesforce platform – no matter where it lives. Perhaps, most importantly, Data Cloud’s zero copy connectors let you use data directly from your pre-existing data lake or warehouse without copying it. In addition to this, you can ingest data from your favorite external apps using our growing library of 200+ pre-built connectors. Plus, Data Cloud’s native Salesforce connectors allow you to pull in data from all your Customer 360 applications, like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. It all adds up to one single, trusted source of truth about your customers and business.

Once all your data is on Data Cloud, you can then harmonize the data to create a single, comprehensive record for every customer. That’s because Data Cloud allows you to map all your data to a unified model that’s integrated with the Salesforce metadata framework. Metadata describes how data works, such as how it's related to other data and how it's used in Salesforce. For example, in Salesforce, this would be represented by an Object like Accounts and Contacts and fields that describe those objects further, like an Account Name or Account Industry. Once integrated with our metadata framework, all your data can now be resolved into a unified view for every customer that teams on Salesforce can easily work with.

Every piece of data brought into Salesforce needs to be secure with policies enforced at scale, no exposure to the public internet, and the right level of access granted to the right people at the right time. That’s why we have several tools to integrate governance across both structured and unstructured data, ensuring trust and compliance throughout the Salesforce ecosystem. You can automate the tagging and classification of unified data and metadata, making it easier to apply policy-based governance across Agentforce, analytics, and segmentation. And you can empower users to author, manage, and consistently enforce policies with just a few clicks, ensuring consistent data access across all data sources. Data Cloud also provides data masking, flexibility in encryption key management and even secure and private connections to safeguard sensitive information while offering flexibility in encryption key management.

With all your data harmonized and the right governance policies in place, you can begin to activate your data across the Salesforce Platform. Data Cloud gives the ability to enhance your unified data by creating calculated insights, segments, or predictive models — all of which can be used to help drive better decision-making or fuel automation inside your organization. Thanks to Data Cloud’s native integration to Salesforce, all of the data and insights you’ve captured in Data Cloud can be surfaced directly on object records like accounts or contact profiles. You can even help your team save valuable time by triggering events and actions based on the data you have in Data Cloud using Flow Builder.

Data Cloud is central to Agentforce’s capabilities, bringing together structured and unstructured data from a multitude of sources in real time. Using our connector ecosystem you can ingest data from 200+ systems. Then, once ingested, you're able to transform and index data, creating a foundation of unified data and insights for Agentforce to tap into. Through the power of RAG and Data Cloud’s no-code retrievers, you can then bring any data directly into prompt templates and flow automations, enabling Agentforce to access essential details from all your structured and unstructured data . Despite being no-code, users can still tailor the retrieval process by defining filters, ranking algorithms, and specifying the desired level of detail for the retrieved data. Data Cloud’s no-code retrievers provide a next-generation experience unlocking accessibility, faster development time, and improved data quality. Importantly, all of this takes place through a governed and secure platform, giving you the ability to manage data access, security, and compliance natively.

Companies are collecting more data about their customers than ever before, yet that data sits in siloes and is disconnected from the customer experience. Data Cloud integrates information from various sources, which helps all teams provide a personalized customer experience at every touchpoint, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, business growth.
Learn how Salesforce Data Cloud can help you connect any data, from anywhere to power Agentforce and memorable customer experiences.

To receive a complementary excerpt of the IDC MarketScape reports, download them here.
Learn more about Data Cloud.
Explore how Data Cloud powers Agentforce.
Explore Agentforce and Data Cloud Customer Stories.
Explore Data Cloud Resources.
Join our Datablazer Community.
See why unstructured data is critical for Agentforce.
Learn more about what makes an AI agent.
Learn more about Data Cloud’s Zero Copy integration.