How Salesforce’s AI salvation journey found a fellow disciple in Informatica

In a hype-punctuated artificial intelligence (AI) landscape, it is often hard to separate the noise from the signal. But Amit Walia, CEO of the Redwood City-based Informatica, has been long enough in the trenches of enterprise software to know that enduring value, at times, lies not in a solo run but in joining hands with the right forces.

Early this May, when Salesforce acquired Informatica in a $8-billion all-cash deal, many saw it as a logical endgame. After all, Salesforce has been on an aggressive spree to position itself as the default operating system for AI-born enterprise software, and had, in fact, failed in its previous attempt in 2024 to buy out the company. But Walia, in an exclusive conversation with Fortune India, mentions this wasn't a moment of capitulation but a sensible convergence.

"Without data, there is no AI," Walia says as a matter of fact, adding, "You can build all the chips and data centers you want, but if you can't get good quality, governed, connected data, none of it will work." For a company thriving in critical enterprise data management, the marriage was destined. Since joining Informatica in 2013, Walia, an IIT Varanasi alumnus, has led the company's product organisation and establishing leadership in new areas of enterprise cloud data management, including the launch of Claire, a GenAI-powered data management assistant. "Marc [Benioff] has been a pioneer in the world of enterprise software. He invented cloud-based SaaS…and as they looked around where the world of AI is going, he saw that the future of AI is data-first. The whole crux of doing this deal was: will it be better for our [common] customers and our employees? The answer to both was yes," explains Walia.

Informatica marks the fourth major buyout for Salesforce, following the $6.5 billion deal with Mulesoft in 2018, followed by the $15.7 billion buyout of Tableau in 2019 and its biggest M&A deal, involving Slack for $27.7 billion, in 2021. According to BARC, a Colorado-based leading analyst firm for data and analytics and enterprise software, the acquisition represents a critical strategic move in the AI and data management landscape. With businesses increasingly rely on AI capabilities, the quality and management of underlying data become paramount and BARC believes Informatica brings robust enterprise-grade data integration, quality and governance capabilities that are essential for AI initiatives. "For Salesforce, which positions itself as the "#1 AI CRM," this acquisition fills a crucial gap in its data infrastructure stack," mentions BARC in its analysis on the deal.

While acknowledging the deal’s potential to strengthen Salesforce data cloud as a more comprehensive solution for data management, analytics, and AI, Gartner, the leading global tech research and advisory firm, points out that the acquisition creates significant product overlaps, particularly with Salesforce’s existing integration portfolio. While Gartner has advised Informatica customers to assess implications for product roadmap alignment, and Informatica’s future as an “independent software vendor”, Salesforce has framed the rationale for the acquisition around the capabilities of Agentic AI, the new buzz word used to describe autonomous, intelligent agents capable of executing end-to-end enterprise workflows.

In the release announcing the deal, Benioff mentioned that the combination brings together Salesforce’s Einstein and Informatica’s Claire AI engines to forge the ultimate AI-data platform. “Together, we’ll supercharge Agentforce, Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft, and Customer 360, enabling autonomous agents to act with intelligence, context, and confidence across every enterprise. This is a transformational step in delivering enterprise-grade AI,” stated Benioff.

Injecting further nuance into the context, Walia tells Fortune India: "Is it [Agentic AI] the lowest hanging fruit [in enterprise AI]? The answer is "No". Is it the most disruptive? The answer is "Yes." Agentic AI will take years to deliver true enterprise value. It's not a feature; it's a re-architecture," believes Walia.

Much of what's parading as "AI" in today's enterprise stack-co-pilots, chatbots, GPT integrations-is what Walia calls "margin enhancements" that are helpful but not transformative. Real disruption, he asserts, will come only when agents can take over entire processes, for instance onboarding employees, underwriting loans, managing hospital workflows, end to end.

While agentic AI is expected to, eventually, transform enterprise processes, all AI formats will continue to coexist with each tailored to different business needs. Among them, agentic may be the most transformative. "Agentic is not going to be the only form factor for AI. All form factors will stay because they serve different use cases with agentic being the most disruptive across the board," says Walia.

On whether AI will result in higher prices or heftier margins, Walia sees the real opportunity in solving more problems for customers: smarter, faster, and more cost-effectively. If a company is doing that, he argues, it will naturally start commanding a larger share of the customer's IT budget. CIO priorities are shifting rapidly, and data and AI are at the very top of that agenda-often alongside cybersecurity. "All software will be disrupted. All hardware will be disrupted. The number you put on AI's market size-100 billion, 300 billion-it doesn't matter. It's all going to be bigger than we think," says Walia.

Citing industry surveys such as those from Gartner, he points out that enterprise tech budgets aren't necessarily growing dramatically, but the internal reallocation is telling. "If a company's IT budget grows from one dollar to a dollar fifty," Walia explains, "the portion going toward data and AI might double-from thirty cents to sixty cents." The implication: even in flat or moderately growing budgets, data-centric AI solutions are taking a much larger share, often at the expense of less critical functions.

In an industry obsessed with valuations and venture capital bravado, Walia's cautions that enterprise AI, especially agentic AI, is not a plug-and-play fantasy. It's a multi-year, full-stack, high-bar transformation. And unless companies don't solve critical enterprise problems with reliable, governed, quality data, a seat at client boardrooms won't come easy.

What’s also pertinent to note is that Informatica’s India operations are at the heart of the M&A deal in terms of its capabilities, but not in the cliched sense. Walia is quick to clarify that Informatica’s Bengaluru centre is not a support function but houses the “innovation brain” of the company. “I never use the word back office. India, for us is an innovation center. The Claire AI core engineering team sits in Bangalore. Most of our cloud work happens in India,” says Walia.

On whether AI will trigger a wave of consolidation in the industry, Walia sounds diplomatic: "Everybody is looking at their portfolio right now. M&A happens for two reasons: consolidation or acquiring innovation. Not every company out there has great products, just because they're in demand," he says.

Put simply: Salesforce understood that, Informatica proved it.