Leading AI: Are you AI ready?

Informatica World Wrap-up

If you’ve been in the Salesforce ecosystem for the past year, you already know the headline: Salesforce acquired Informatica in November 2025. That's not a minor product partnership — that's Salesforce placing a massive bet on data management and ETL tooling as a core part of its platform story. AI is the accelerant igniting the flame of responsible data management. 

For us at BrightHelm, that creates a specific and urgent question: our clients are nonprofits running Salesforce, increasingly migrating from NPSP to the new Agentforce for Nonprofits (formerly Nonprofit Cloud), and they all have data. Messy data. Legacy data. Data living in spreadsheets and a dozen systems that need to find their way into Salesforce cleanly. 

What is AI ready?

Walking into Informatica World 2026 felt different than I expected. This wasn't a standalone data company trying to hold its own conference. This was, without question, a Salesforce ecosystem event — same energy, same crowd, same sense that the product roadmap is being shaped by something much larger than any one tool.

The sessions leaned hard into the "two powerhouses working as one" framing, which, fair — that's exactly what's happening. The emphasis throughout was on AI and data management as inseparable: you can't have agentic AI doing meaningful work without clean, connected data underneath it. That's not marketing language. That's actually true, and it's the lens through which I was evaluating everything I heard.

Data Management and Transformation are the leading components to success. If you choose to move into AI without clean data, at best, it will feel like AI is trolling your users; at worst, it will result in detrimental business outcomes. 

Sadly, most companies do not realize how messy their data is until they are confronted with it. The introduction of AI makes that more relevant and obvious than any other point in data history. The game is no longer data scraping and compiling a holistic view of constituents. It isn’t simply showing data in spreadsheets to decision makers. Those are important pieces to the puzzle, don’t get me wrong, but they are legacy foundation and presentation components of data work. The priority now is managing data constantly and consistently, so agents can surface the right information at the right time in the right way. 

Telling a bot to close a case once the answer is provided is fairly simple. However, we want that agent to look at the history of interactions with the client, the weather patterns that may impact shipping, the deeper satisfaction levels of others using the product or service, and to highlight potential issues that have not surfaced in the case. Raise the flag that we are missing. We don’t simply want to redirect work, rather we need agents that actively support organizational success. This is what we are demanding agents to do for our companies: to truly be a co-worker and partner, not just a bot that performs a function. 

The most salient statement I heard came from The George Washington University who added a “Data Management” statement to their job descriptions. Why? Because no one can say, “It’s not my job” anymore. Not in an agentic enterprise.

Data management is your job. 

It is my job. 

It is everyone’s job. 

So they included it in every job description. That is the level of importance data management should receive in your organization. Anything less is a recipe for the agentic demise of an organization. 

Here's the Honest Picture

What I believe is true: ETL is a near-term necessity for any serious NPSP to AFNP migration. Data doesn't move itself, and clients who've deferred cleaning up their data architecture are going to feel that pain acutely as they migrate. Informatica is Salesforce's endorsed path forward on that problem.

What I'm still figuring out: Whether Informatica is the right tool for our clients at their scale, or whether there are lighter-weight solutions that get the job done without the enterprise price tag. That's not a knock — it's just an honest question. Our clients are nonprofits. Budget is always part of the equation. 

What I came away with: A clearer picture of the product, a better sense of where Salesforce is taking this, and a relationship worth pursuing. They are providing a tool necessary for success. Whether pricing fits into a budget is a separate question; data management and ETL are non-negotiable in an agentic world.