Salesforce Connections has always been the event for marketers in the Salesforce ecosystem. This year it’s also the clearest signal yet of where enterprise marketing is headed: toward AI that doesn’t just assist, but acts — and toward the governance frameworks teams need to make that shift safely.
Whether you’re flying to Chicago in June, tuning in from your desk, or deciding which sessions are worth your calendar time, here’s what to expect at CNX 2026 and what it means for the way your team creates.
When and where is Salesforce Connections 2026?
Connections 2026 takes place June 3–4, 2026 at McCormick Place West Building in Chicago. Sessions run from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. both days, with keynotes, 280+ breakout sessions, hands-on workshops, live demos, and the return of Agentforce City on the show floor.
For teams looking to go deeper, Salesforce is also running a Trailblazer Bootcamp from May 31 to June 2, ahead of the main event. And for anyone who can’t make it to Chicago, the full event streams live on Salesforce+.
The theme this year: agentic marketing
If Connections 2025 was about AI assistance, 2026 is about AI autonomy. Salesforce is leaning hard into what it’s calling the Agentic Enterprise — a vision where AI agents don’t just generate content or summarize data, but take action across the marketing stack. Retargeting, spend reallocation, journey optimization, and real-time campaign adjustments are all being positioned as agent-driven workflows.
That shift raises the stakes for every enterprise marketing team. When AI agents can ship content, adjust spend, and trigger journeys autonomously, the governance layer around them matters more than ever. What counts as approved? Who signs off on a variant an agent generated at 2 a.m.? How do you audit an agent’s decisions when regulators come knocking?
These are the questions the best sessions at Connections will be trying to answer.
Key themes to watch
Agentforce and the agentic marketing stack
Agentforce is the throughline of nearly every marketing-track session this year. Expect deep dives on how agents handle personalization, segmentation, spend optimization, and customer engagement across channels. Demos will feature autonomous capabilities like retargeting decisions, budget reallocation, and instant messaging responses.
Why it matters: The promise is speed and scale. The risk is that agents move faster than your review process can keep up. Teams that adopt Agentforce without rethinking how approvals, brand standards, and compliance checks work are going to run into the same pattern we keep seeing across the enterprise: AI adoption that creates more errors, not fewer.
Marketing Cloud innovations
Expect a wave of announcements across the Marketing Cloud family — deeper Agentforce integration, updates to journey orchestration, and new capabilities aimed at helping marketers automate more of the campaign lifecycle.
Why it matters: Marketing Cloud is the delivery engine for a huge portion of enterprise email and customer engagement programs. New capabilities are exciting, but they also introduce new complexity upstream. The teams getting the most out of Marketing Cloud are the ones who’ve thought carefully about what gets created, how it’s reviewed, and how it enters the platform in the first place.
Data Cloud and connected customer experiences
Data Cloud continues to be Salesforce’s answer to the fragmented customer data problem. Sessions will show how unified data powers personalized experiences across Marketing, Sales, Service, and Commerce — and how AI agents use that data to make real-time decisions.
Why it matters: More personalization means more content. More content means more review cycles, more brand risk, and more places compliance can break down. Unified data is only valuable if the content built on top of it is governed.
Industry-specific use cases
Connections 2026 has notable industry tracks, especially for regulated sectors. Life sciences, financial services, and healthcare teams will find sessions focused directly on the tension between AI-powered personalization and regulatory compliance. Keep an eye on the full Connections 2026 agenda as more sessions are added.
Why it matters: Regulated industries feel the governance gap earlier and more acutely than anyone else. If you work in financial services, healthcare, or life sciences, these are the sessions where the conversation about AI and compliance will be most honest.
What this means for your team
Here’s the pattern we keep seeing across enterprise marketing: leadership mandates AI to move faster. Teams adopt it. Governance lags behind. Errors show up. Oversight gets added. And the teams that adopted AI to move faster end up slower than they were before.
Connections 2026 is going to reinforce, loudly, that AI is changing how marketing gets made. The question every marketing leader should be asking on the flight home is: Is our creation process ready for it?
That readiness doesn’t come from buying more AI. It comes from building governance into the creation process itself — so brand standards, compliance rules, and approval logic are already in place when AI output lands. That’s what we call Governed Creation™: the operating model where governance is embedded upstream, not bolted on after the fact.
How Stensul fits into the Salesforce stack
Stensul handles the upstream half of the content lifecycle — template assembly, module governance, AI-assisted creation inside a governed structure, brand and compliance guardrails, and approval workflows. Once content is approved, it flows directly into your Salesforce stack ready to deploy.
With Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC): Teams collaborate on on-brand, render-tested emails in Stensul, author Dynamic Content modules tied to SFMC data extensions, and preview personalized variations directly in the builder before anything ships. Approved HTML — including subject line, pre-header, and business unit — uploads to SFMC folders via a secure API in a single click. A newer, streamlined dynamic content workflow lets teams create and re-use SFMC segments, skip unnecessary save steps with built-in autosave, and approve every personalized variation with confidence — turning dynamic content from a cumbersome process into a scalable way to personalize email production at enterprise volume.
With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot): Teams build emails and landing pages in Stensul with MCAE-native features, including PHL/PML personalization strings and embedded Pardot Forms. Approved HTML uploads to Pardot folders and campaigns via a secure API, carrying subject line, from/reply-to, and email type with it.
Salesforce handles orchestration, delivery, and data. Stensul handles what happens before content ever reaches those tools. Together, they form a continuous, governed content lifecycle.
If you’re going to be in Chicago, come find us at booth #6 — we’d love to talk about how Governed Creation™ pairs with Agentforce and the broader Salesforce stack to help your team move faster without trading away control.
