Salesforce’s Chief Executive Officer, Marc Benioff, is in the midst of developing the company’s comprehensive annual strategic blueprint—a process that defines Salesforce’s priorities, objectives, and executional methods for the coming fiscal year. In a detailed discussion with Business Insider, Benioff offered an insightful glimpse into several central themes guiding Salesforce’s vision for the next twelve months, outlining not merely tactical goals but a broad philosophy of innovation, growth, and technological evolution.
This guiding document is formally known within Salesforce as the V2MOM, an acronym that stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measurements. More than a simple internal memorandum, the V2MOM serves as a unifying framework for the entire organization, ensuring that tens of thousands of employees remain aligned behind a shared purpose and measurable results. It is disseminated internally at the dawn of each fiscal year—beginning every February—and functions both as a roadmap for leadership and a motivational compass for Salesforce’s global workforce. The annual plan frequently includes forward-looking financial and operational forecasts. A telling example occurred when Business Insider revealed early details from Salesforce’s 2023 strategy, which emphasized cost reduction and the expansion of profit margins. The strategic clarity of that initiative resonated strongly with investors, helping to ignite a surge in Salesforce’s stock performance during that period.
In more recent months, Salesforce has intensified its commitment to the artificial intelligence revolution unfolding across the technology sector, devoting significant resources toward what Benioff has described as a bold and transformative wager: the era of autonomous AI agents. The company’s flagship AI initiative, branded as Agentforce, stands at the center of this transition. Despite healthy skepticism from certain shareholders, clients, and even internal stakeholders regarding the scale and feasibility of Salesforce’s AI ambitions, recent earnings results released on Wednesday suggested encouraging momentum and promising indicators for sustained success in the next fiscal year.
Benioff confirmed that the forthcoming V2MOM will be structured around four interdependent pillars. The first and arguably most critical component, he explained, is establishing a robust data foundation. “Without reliable and contextually rich data,” Benioff noted, “AI agents cannot operate effectively—you risk generating hallucinations, the industry term for inaccurate or fabricated AI outputs.” His remarks underscore the centrality of data integrity in the modern AI ecosystem: intelligence without accuracy and context quickly loses value.
To fortify this foundation, Salesforce recently completed the $8 billion acquisition of cloud data management company Informatica, a strategic move that will be integrated with Salesforce’s existing suite of platforms, including Mulesoft and Data 360. Together, these systems are designed to create what Benioff referred to as a customer data environment that is “harmonized, federated, and integrated.” This means that data from various customer touchpoints—often stored in disparate systems—will be unified into a seamless network. According to Benioff, such integration is vital to delivering precise, context-aware customer engagement and represents a capability that every Salesforce client will ultimately rely upon.
The imperative of a strong data foundation becomes even clearer when viewed within the broader context of the generative AI revolution that is reshaping the entire software industry. Organizations everywhere are now learning that the key to unlocking AI’s full potential lies in blending proprietary enterprise data with the sophisticated capabilities of large-scale language and predictive models. By orchestrating this synergy, businesses can invent new products, refine services, and uncover operational efficiencies that were previously unattainable.
For Salesforce, which already manages colossal volumes of enterprise data across global industries, reinforcing this foundational layer opens the door to building far more powerful AI-driven products. It not only enhances the sophistication of Agentforce but also strengthens Salesforce’s overarching mission to empower companies through automation, insight, and customer-centric intelligence.
Building upon this data core, Benioff identified the second pillar of Salesforce’s forthcoming strategic plan: the layer of business applications that customers interact with daily. This includes Salesforce’s signature Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform—long the bedrock of its enterprise offerings—along with the collaboration hub Slack and the visualization powerhouse Tableau. Together, these applications form the user-centric surface atop Salesforce’s data ecosystem, translating the underlying intelligence into practical functionality for organizations of all sizes.
The third dimension of the 2025 strategic framework revolves around Agentforce itself. While Benioff declined to share extensive specifics about its future evolution within the V2MOM, he emphasized that the innovation has advanced rapidly over the past year, evolving from a conceptual platform into a viable, production-level suite capable of supporting dynamic, context-aware digital agents tailored to distinct customer workflows.
Finally, the fourth and concluding component in Benioff’s outline concerns the continuing evolution of bespoke AI agents—intelligent assistants meticulously crafted to meet the needs of specific enterprise clients. These personalized solutions extend beyond generalized AI models, with examples including custom-built agents for major brands such as Williams-Sonoma, as well as internal employee-facing tools like Salesforce’s Slackbot. Benioff himself reportedly leaned on Slackbot’s capabilities throughout his discussion with Business Insider, using it as an interactive tool to retrieve data and respond to complex queries in real time.
Salesforce’s long-term vision, Benioff explained, involves scaling these AI-driven solutions across various sectors of the economy—developing tailored agent systems for industries as diverse as automotive manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and public-sector operations. This industry-focused approach ensures that Salesforce’s technology not only advances in sophistication but remains directly relevant to the real-world challenges faced by its clients.
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Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-benioff-salesforce-strategy-upcoming-year-2025-12
