If you’re a marketer on the Salesforce platform, Summer ’26 is worth paying attention to. The release is 822 pages across 23 product pillars, so we’ve pulled out what’s relevant to your day-to-day, and what it means for where your platform is headed.
The short version: if you’re on Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement, the new features that matter are being built in Marketing Cloud Next (MCN). That doesn’t mean you need to migrate tomorrow, but if you’ve been putting off that conversation, Summer ’26 is a good reason to have it.
The new agents
Two new agents were announced at Salesforce Connections and are in pilot now.
- The Marketing Goals Agent takes your campaign objectives and builds the campaigns for you. You set the goal; the agent handles the build and optimises as it runs.
- The Content Agent generates on-brand assets across every channel in a single pass. Email, SMS, social. Briefed once, produced together, grounded in your brand context.
These join the Campaign Creation Agent and Journey Decision Agent in the new Agentforce Builder. The Journey Decision Agent has been upgraded and can now make decisions based on real-time behavioural and profile data, rather than following a fixed sequence.
If your sales team sends their own emails, the Distributed Marketing Agent is worth knowing about. It gives sales users access to your approved templates and lets them personalise content before sending, while you keep control of brand and compliance. Results flow through a central dashboard so you can see what’s going out.
Both new agents are pilots, so test in sandbox before rolling out. And agents use data credits. Go in with a clear plan for what you’re turning on and why. Trailhead and Salesforce’s official documentation are the right place to start before you enable anything.
What’s changing in flows
Three flow improvements worth knowing about.
You can now send to actionable lists and CRM objects directly from flows. If you’ve been managing separate automation logic across Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud and working around the limitations, this release starts to close that.
Email templates can now be referenced by name rather than ID. If you’ve ever had a flow break after moving between sandbox and production because template IDs don’t match across environments, that problem is now gone.
Summer ’26 also introduces Audience Flow in Marketing Cloud Next, a single, simplified flow type for audience-based sends. Choose your data source (lists, segments, records, or campaigns) and build from there, rather than navigating separate flow types depending on your audience logic.
AMPscript comes to Marketing Cloud Next
AMPscript is now available in MCN. It’s the scripting language that powers dynamic, personalised content in classic Marketing Cloud. It’s how you pull in a contact’s name, loyalty tier, recent purchase, or any other data field and make an email feel like it was written for that specific person.
What’s available now: Lookups, Loops and Conditionals, Content Retrieval, String Manipulation, Math functions, and Utilities. Coming soon: Lookup Enhancements, Impression Regions, ClaimRow, Encryption, and URL tracking.
Conversational Email
Conversational Email turns your outbound sends into two-way exchanges. Rather than routing replies to a human queue, agents handle them in real time, answering questions, making recommendations, deflecting support cases.
If you run high-volume nurture or transactional email programs and replies have always been a problem to manage at scale, this changes what email can do for you.
New features in Salesforce Foundations
If you’re on Salesforce Foundations, two new native marketing features are now included.
- People Scoring evaluates how well a contact fits your ideal customer profile and how engaged they are, assigns points based on rules you define, and keeps records updated on a schedule.
- Web Tracking captures first-party visitor activity on your Marketing Landing Pages and external sites, feeding segments and campaigns based on what people actually do.
If you’ve been evaluating whether you need a separate marketing automation tool, these features are worth reassessing before you decide.
Contentful: Worth knowing about now
On 1 June 2026, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful, a content platform used by more than 4,800 brands. The deal is expected to close in Q3 of Salesforce’s FY2027, so there’s nothing to implement yet.
What Contentful brings is a structured, API-first way to manage and deliver content across web, email, and mobile from a single place. If you’ve been limited in what you can publish or personalise without developer support, this is the acquisition to watch. Get familiar with what Contentful does now so you’re ready when the integration arrives.
Where things are heading
Salesforce’s investment is behind Marketing Cloud Next and Agentforce. Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement are still being maintained, but the new features are being built elsewhere.
If you’re on a legacy marketing product and have been thinking about what’s next, Summer ’26 is a reasonable point to start planning. The consent management improvements in this release address one of the most common friction points in moving from Account Engagement to MCN, which makes the migration path more straightforward than it was.
The best starting point, as we heard consistently at CNX, isn’t to automate what you already do. It’s to find the thing you’ve never had the capacity or tools to do, and start there.
If Marketing Cloud Next has been on your radar but the timing hasn’t felt right, this is a good release to start the conversation. We work with teams at every stage of the MCN journey, from mapping out what migration looks like for your org, to activating and getting the most out of what’s available now.
