Salesforce Connections 2026: What Chicago's Biggest Marketing Event Means for Your Agentic Strategy
Salesforce Connections 2026 hits Chicago on June 3–4 — and if you work in Salesforce marketing, commerce, or CRM operations, this is the event worth building a travel case for. The agenda is the most Agentforce-dense in the conference's history. The question isn't whether AI agents are coming to your marketing stack. It's whether your org will be set up to use them when they arrive.
At Inforge, a Salesforce consultancy that runs its entire delivery model through AI agents, we've been tracking the CNX 2026 agenda closely. Here's what we see, what it means for mid-market teams, and what you should actually do with what you learn.
Key Takeaways:
Salesforce Connections 2026 runs June 3–4 at McCormick Place West in Chicago, with live streaming on Salesforce+.
The event features 280+ sessions — the highest count in CNX history — with Agentforce as the central throughline.
New for 2026: Agentforce City, an immersive show-floor space featuring live AI agent demonstrations across industries.
Sessions cover autonomous campaign planning, AI-driven segmentation, journey orchestration, and real-time attribution.
Teams that show up without implementation questions will leave with theory. Come with specifics.
What Salesforce Connections 2026 Actually Is
Connections is Salesforce's flagship marketing and commerce conference. It's not Dreamforce — it's smaller, more focused, and more actionable for the people building and running Salesforce orgs day to day.
According to Salesforce, Connections 2026 takes place June 3–4 at McCormick Place West in Chicago, with a full broadcast available on Salesforce+ for teams who can't make it in person.
Unlike Dreamforce, which covers the full Salesforce ecosystem, Connections revolves around marketing, commerce, and customer engagement — the intersection where most mid-market revenue teams live. Sessions run 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. both days, with keynotes, breakout sessions, hands-on workshops, and live demos packed into a two-day format built for practitioners.
The Agentforce Agenda: 280+ Sessions, One Through-Line
Agentforce is the dominant theme at CNX 2026 — not as a product announcement, but as the practical focus across nearly every marketing-track session.
According to Salesforce, this year's event features more than 280 sessions, the highest session count in Connections history, with priority placed on community-led learning and hands-on practical application.
Here's what's on the agenda that actually matters for Salesforce orgs:
Autonomous Campaign Planning and Execution
Sessions will walk attendees through two distinct Agentforce Marketing adoption roadmaps — one for teams layering agents onto existing campaigns, one for teams building new autonomous workflows from scratch. Attendees can expect actionable steps on AI-driven segmentation and implementation timelines.
Agentic Workflows for Email and SMS
Expect deep-dive sessions on using AI to predict content performance, adjust messaging in real time, and optimize deliverability at scale — practical guidance for teams running high-volume campaigns on Marketing Cloud.
How Developers Build Agentic Workflows
A technical session on building custom agents that connect data, logic, and actions across live marketing systems. If your team includes a Salesforce admin or developer attending CNX, this one belongs on their agenda.
Why Last-Click Attribution Is Failing
Privacy changes, walled gardens, and AI-driven discovery have broken last-click models. This session covers the shift to known-audience and incrementality frameworks — the framework your RevOps team should already be building toward.
According to Knak's enterprise marketing guide for CNX 2026, sessions that mention "Flow" are especially worth tracking — Salesforce is replacing Journey Builder with Flow-based orchestration, and Connections is where the transition timeline will become clear for Marketing Cloud teams.
Agentforce City: The Show Floor Has Changed
The most significant new addition to CNX 2026 is Agentforce City — and it's more than a branded booth area.
According to Salesforce's official CNX 2026 preview, Agentforce City is an immersive, interactive space designed to bring AI out of the conceptual phase and into reality, featuring real-world customer stories and live use cases of Agentforce running across different industries.
More specifically, according to Martech Notes, Agentforce City lets attendees watch AI agents perform real marketing tasks — from building audience segments to generating personalized email content — inside actual Salesforce orgs. No slide decks. No theoretical demos. Live agents, live orgs.
For a mid-market team that hasn't yet deployed Agentforce, this is the highest-value 30 minutes you can spend at the conference. Watching an agent execute against a real workflow is more useful than three keynotes about what's possible.
The Agentic Marketing Showdown — And What It Signals
Also new to CNX 2026: a live Agentforce hackathon on the show floor.
According to the Connections 2026 session catalog, Salesforce admins and builders will compete head-to-head to design, configure, and deploy real-world Agentforce use cases — from automating campaign creation to orchestrating cross-channel actions and intelligent workflows.
This matters beyond the entertainment value. Competitions like this compress what's possible into a visible, comparable format. When you watch a team deploy a working agent in a constrained time window, you stop asking "could this work?" and start asking "what would it take to do this in our org?"
That's the right question. And it's the one Inforge spends every day answering.
What CNX 2026 Means for Your Salesforce Stack Right Now
Here's the honest read from a team that's already operating this way:
The sessions will tell you what's possible. They'll show you the roadmap, the product updates coming in the Summer '26 release, and the patterns that leading marketing orgs are using with Agentforce. That's genuinely valuable.
The gap is implementation. Most orgs leave Connections with a notebook full of ideas and a Salesforce stack that hasn't changed. The bottleneck isn't AI capability. It's that most orgs aren't yet set up to delegate to it.
At Inforge, we've found that the teams who move fastest post-CNX are the ones who arrive with specific, scoped questions — not "how do agents work?" but "we have a lead nurture journey in Marketing Cloud that's triggered manually today — can an agent own that handoff?"
Connections gives you the framework. Implementation is what comes next.
According to CMSWire's Connections 2026 guide, the event features industry-specific sessions covering retail, consumer goods, financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare — making it relevant for mid-market teams across verticals, not just enterprise orgs with dedicated Salesforce teams.
How to Register and What It Costs
According to Salesforce, passes for Connections 2026 are priced at $699, which includes access to 280+ sessions, 50+ product demos, 20+ hands-on trainings, lunch, and the exclusive evening concert at Wintrust Arena. Group pricing drops to $399 per pass for teams registering three or more attendees.
For teams that can't travel to Chicago, Salesforce+ streams the full event for free — including live keynotes and select session recordings available on demand after the event.
For teams seriously evaluating Agentforce implementation, the in-person experience is worth the cost. The Agentforce Consultations — one-on-one sessions with Salesforce product experts available both days — are where you get direct answers to implementation questions that would otherwise take weeks of back-and-forth to resolve.
A pre-conference Trailblazer Bootcamp also runs May 31–June 2, offering three additional days of immersive, certification-aligned training for teams that want to arrive at the main event already up to speed.
Summary
Salesforce Connections 2026 is the clearest signal yet that Agentforce isn't a roadmap item — it's a live capability that marketing and commerce teams are expected to use now. The CNX 2026 agenda is built for practitioners: 280+ sessions, hands-on workshops, live agent demos, and direct access to Salesforce product experts. For Salesforce orgs evaluating agentic marketing, this is the event that closes the gap between "we've heard about this" and "here's our implementation plan." At Inforge, we help mid-market teams move from Connections to deployment — faster, and without adding headcount to do it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: When and where is Salesforce Connections 2026?
A: Salesforce Connections 2026 takes place June 3–4, 2026, at McCormick Place West Building in Chicago, Illinois. Sessions run from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. both days. The event is also streamed live and on demand via Salesforce+.
Q: Who should attend Salesforce Connections 2026?
A: Connections is designed for marketing professionals, commerce practitioners, RevOps leaders, Salesforce admins, and developers working within the Salesforce ecosystem. It's especially relevant for teams evaluating or actively implementing Agentforce Marketing, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, or Data Cloud.
Q: What is Agentforce City at CNX 2026?
A: Agentforce City is a new immersive show-floor space at Connections 2026 where attendees can watch AI agents execute real marketing tasks — segment building, personalized content generation, journey orchestration — inside live Salesforce orgs. It's the most practical demonstration of Agentforce available at the event.
Q: Can I attend Salesforce Connections 2026 virtually?
A: Yes. Salesforce+ streams the full event for free, including keynotes and select session content. For teams unable to travel to Chicago, virtual attendance is a practical option that covers the major announcements and product reveals.
Q: How can Inforge help us act on what we learn at Connections?
A: Inforge is a Salesforce consultancy that delivers full implementations through AI agents — the same model CNX 2026 sessions will be describing. We work with mid-market teams to scope, build, and deploy Agentforce workflows post-conference, turning session insights into live capabilities in your org. Reach out before or after the event — we're happy to help you frame the right questions before you arrive.
