For years, marketers have been told to do more with less, operating on smaller budgets, with leaner teams, and across more channels. At Connections 2026 in Chicago, Salesforce argued that the pressure is the same as ever, but marketers now have much more capacity to handle it.
Both keynotes made the same case for agents taking on the repetitive work so marketers can spend more time on the parts that matter.
Here’s what that looks like in practice, and what it means for your team.
What the “Age of the Marketing Maker” Means for Marketing Teams
Salesforce framed the whole event around what it’s calling the “Age of the Marketing Maker.” The idea is that marketers spend most of their time building things like assets, campaigns, reports, and approvals, when they should be spending it thinking and deciding.
The numbers back that up. 73% of marketers say they don’t get the data support they need, one in three say content approvals are their single biggest challenge, and the average campaign supply chain spans more than 100 touchpoints and takes 12 to 14 weeks to execute. That’s a systems problem, and agents are being positioned as the fix.
We think they’re right, and what sets teams apart now is how well they put agents to work on the repetitive, time-consuming tasks so their people can focus on strategy, creativity, and relationships.
The Agentforce Marketing Agents You Can Start Using Now
A lot of what Salesforce announced is already live or piloting in June, so you can start acting on it now.
Agentforce Coworker and Slackbot
Agentforce Coworker and the Slackbot are the easiest places to start. Coworker connects to your Salesforce data and answers strategic questions in minutes that used to take a marketing analyst two or three weeks. Ask why marketing-driven pipeline is down 18% this quarter, and it pulls campaign performance, opportunity data, and underperforming programs, then makes recommendations. The Slackbot does the same for executive updates, building QBR summaries and Tableau visualizations on demand, which clears a bottleneck most marketing teams know well. Salesforce says teams are saving up to 20 hours a week.
Marketing Goals Agent and Content Agent
The Marketing Goals Agent and Agentforce Content Agent, both piloting in June 2026, are the bigger bet, and the F1 demo showed why. A global team of around 1,000 used agents to plan and launch full campaigns for 35,000 fans, segmenting by geography, building personalized email and SMS drafts, and optimizing in real time once the campaigns were live. The agents handle briefing, asset creation, and performance monitoring, while the marketers handle decisions and fine-tuning.
Qualified and Piper for Pipeline Generation
Qualified and Piper round out the pipeline side. With its acquisition of Qualified, Salesforce is putting a 24/7 AI agent on the corporate website that holds voice and video conversations with prospects, qualifies buyers, books meetings, and sends personalized follow-ups before a sales rep would have even seen the lead. The Adecco demo showed one running a full inbound buyer journey in real time, in any language, for more than 10,000 visitors at once. Average go-live is 45 days. If you’re struggling to get buyers into your systems fast enough, it’s worth a hard look.
What Agentforce Means for B2B and B2C Marketers
The second keynote went deeper into Agentforce Marketing as a platform, and the message for both B2B and B2C teams was that the line between marketing and sales is blurring, and agents are what enable you to work across it.
For B2C Marketing Teams
For B2C teams, the Pearson demo showed how to make existing Marketing Cloud journeys agentic without having to rebuild from scratch. You add two-way conversational agents to email and SMS, so customers can ask questions and get responses based on their actual history, with no new infrastructure required.
For B2B Marketing Teams
For B2B teams, the focus was the sales-marketing handoff, still one of the messiest problems in the business. Here, agents qualify inbound leads, run nurture sequences automatically, and surface insights both teams can use, taking on a problem 74% of B2B marketers still haven’t solved.
Brand Center: Consistent Brand Voice Across Channels
The Brand Center, generally available in June 2026, ties it together by giving you one place to set brand voice, positioning, and guidelines that carry forward automatically across every asset and channel an agent produces.
Our Take: Where to Start with Agentforce
What set CNX26 apart from past Salesforce events was that the demos were live, running inside real customer environments like F1, Adecco, Pearson, LiveNation, and Ben Bridge, with agents doing work that used to take a team weeks.
That doesn’t mean it’s effortless. Agents can only work well with clean data, clear goals, and the right setup. That’s where the real work is, and where strategy matters more than the technology.
If you’re a Salesforce customer wondering where to start, Salesforce’s own recommendation was to turn on Agentforce Coworker and the Slackbot, see what the new marketing agents can do for your campaign workflow, and prioritize Qualified if building pipeline is the goal.
One thing we’d add is not to wait for a perfect plan. The teams getting the most out of Agentforce started small, learned fast, and scaled what worked. That’s how Salesforce built Piper, starting with a fraction of their website traffic and expanding to all of it. Thirty-seven days from concept to live.
The age of the marketing maker is here. The only question is what you’ll make.
Ready to talk through what agentic marketing could look like for your team? Let’s connect.
