What We Heard (and Shared) at Salesforce Connections 2026

Salesforce Connections 2026 had a clear throughline: marketing teams are ready to stop managing tools and start executing work. Patrick Stokes set the tone in his keynote with the rise of the “marketing maker,” a shift where marketers ship more ideas, optimize faster, and spend more time creating value for customers instead of coordinating across systems.

That framing carried through every conversation we had for the rest of the week. Gradial led two sessions at CNX26, met teams across the show floor, and heard a consistent message: the industry is ready for a new operating model.

One question came up at the booth more than any other: “Do you integrate with ___?” Fill in the blank with SFMC, AEM, Workfront, Sitecore, or whatever else lives in the stack.

The answer is yes. But it is worth unpacking why the question comes up so often.

Enterprise marketing teams have spent years assembling best-in-class tools: a CMS, DAM, ESP, CDP, workflow management, analytics, and more. Each tool does its job. The problem is that nobody bought the thing that makes all of them work together as a single workflow. So the connective tissue becomes people: manual handoffs, status meetings, copy-paste between systems, and tickets that sit in queues.

“Do you integrate?” is really a question about execution. It is not just whether two systems can talk to each other. It is whether the work can actually flow from brief to live without a human being the integration layer at every step.

That is what we built Gradial to solve: not another platform to consolidate into, but an orchestration layer that runs across the systems teams already use, where agents execute the work inside each tool.

Our first session featured Doug Tallmadge, Gradial CEO, and Gary Kamikawa, Head of Marketing and Growth Technology at Amazon Music.

Amazon Music had a familiar challenge. They had invested in best-in-class tools across Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Workfront, and their own first-party CDP. Each system was doing its job well, but the result was fragmentation: specialized skillsets required for each tool, manual handoffs between teams, and campaigns that moved slower than the business needed.

They faced two choices: consolidate everything into a single platform, which would mean ripping and replacing existing investments, losing best-in-class capability, and taking on multi-year migration risk; or add an orchestration layer that connects the systems they had already invested in, where agents execute work across tools and governance is centralized.

They chose the orchestration layer.

The session walked through what that looks like in practice: Gradial sitting at the center of the stack, with agents executing workflows across email, DAM, CMS, CDP, and analytics. Not replacing those systems. Running inside them. The shift is from siloed systems and disconnected campaigns to a unified execution layer where work flows from one system to the next without manual handoffs.

The concept that resonated most was agentic content infrastructure: the idea that the old model of services firms, fragmented tools, and infrastructure is being replaced by two connected layers.

• An agentic workflow layer, where agents execute the work.
• An agentic content infrastructure layer, where those agents get the unified context they need to do it well.

The promise is simple and significant: 10x cheaper, 10x faster, and 100x more reliable.

Our second session, led by Anish Chadalavada, tackled a topic that came up everywhere at the event: how AI search is reshaping brand discovery, and what marketing teams need to do about it.

The premise is straightforward. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity a buying question, there is no list of ten blue links. There is a synthesized answer with a handful of cited sources. Your brand is either part of that answer or it is not.

Based on the research we have been running across industries, most brands are being mentioned by AI models but not cited. The AI knows who you are. It just does not link to your website.

The session covered how Gradial’s approach connects the intelligence layer—GEO and SEO recommendations, simulated persona journeys, performance insights, and experiment outcomes—with the execution layer: authoring, tagging, QA and governance, and workflow. The insight alone does not move the needle. What matters is closing the loop between knowing what to fix and actually shipping the fix continuously, at the speed AI search demands.

This is where the system of work concept connects directly to GEO. AI search results shift constantly. Forty to sixty percent of cited sources can change within a single month. If your optimization cycle ends at a dashboard, you are already behind.

Beyond the sessions, we ran live demos at Booth #101 showing custom workflows in real marketing systems. Campaigns built in minutes, not weeks. Content authored, reviewed, and published without the bottlenecks that slow most teams down.

We also shared case studies from customers already running this model:

• T-Mobile cut time-to-publish by 85 to 98% across content operations, with improved consistency in metadata, compliance, and accessibility.
• GM achieved 20x ROI by reducing manual update time from 300 hours to 15 hours through automated bulk updates across their AEM environment.
• AWS compressed a 2-year site migration plan down to 4 months, with 6x faster execution through automation and metadata cleanup.
• Kaiser Permanente drove 3x ROI by automating accessibility and compliance audits during content creation, ensuring WCAG 2.2 and brand standards without manual reviews.

The theme of Connections this year was not about any single product or feature. It was about a shift in how marketing teams operate: less time coordinating, more time creating; less managing the gaps between tools, more executing the work that drives outcomes.

That is the shift from systems of record to systems of work. And based on the conversations we had all week, the industry is ready for it.

If you are heading to Gartner Marketing Symposium in Denver, we will be there next. Come find us.

And if you want to see how Gradial works across your stack, request a demo.