AWS re:Invent 2025 - Unify Data for a Strong AI Foundation with AWS & Salesforce (DAT206)

Unifying Data for a Strong AI Foundation with AWS & Salesforce

Overview

• Salesforce and AWS have partnered to help customers unlock the full potential of their data and deliver better personalized experiences.
• The presentation covers Salesforce's "Data 360" platform and how it enables data unification, harmonization, and activation across the enterprise.
• Key focus areas include enabling personalized customer experiences, empowering agents with the right data and AI models, and providing end-to-end trust and compliance.

Salesforce Data 360

• Data 360 is Salesforce's "activation engine" for harnessing, harmonizing, and activating data across an organization.
• It is not a system of record, warehouse, or lakehouse, but rather a platform to unify and activate data from various sources.
• The three key building blocks of Data 360 are:
  1. Accessing data wherever it resides in the most suitable manner
  2. Harmonizing data to create a unified customer profile
  3. Governing the data to manage permissions and ensure compliance

Data Connectivity and Zero Copy

• Data 360 provides a rich connectivity suite to access data from various sources, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
• The key focus is on "zero copy" access, which allows secure runtime access to external data sources without duplicating the data.
• Zero copy maximizes the value of existing investments in data products like data warehouses and lakehouses by avoiding the need to duplicate data.
• Key benefits of zero copy include:
  • Always accessing the latest data without staleness
  • Avoiding the need for data duplication, which can introduce synchronization issues
  • Enabling parallelized queries for improved performance
  • Lower costs by avoiding duplicate storage and compute

Integrating with AWS

• Salesforce and AWS have tightly integrated Data 360 with various AWS services to enable seamless data access and activation.
• Key AWS services integrated include:
  • Athena, RDS, Aurora for traditional database access (query federation)
  • S3, Glue, and Iceberg for data lake access (file federation)
  • EMR, Redshift, and Athena for data sharing back to AWS
• The integration leverages AWS services like Lake Formation for fine-grained access control and Glue's Iceberg capabilities for change data capture.
• This bi-directional data flow enables advanced use cases like running AI agents on both the Salesforce and AWS platforms.

Customer Success Stories

• 1800 Accountant, an accounting services firm, used Data 360 to unify data across multiple systems and enable AI agents to handle 70% of customer inquiries.
• Buyer's Edge, a procurement company in the food industry, unified over 20 systems to create a unified customer view and deliver personalized offers.

Key Takeaways

• Salesforce and AWS have partnered to provide a comprehensive solution for data unification and activation, enabling better customer experiences and AI-powered workflows.
• Data 360's "zero copy" capability is a key innovation, allowing secure runtime access to external data sources without duplicating data.
• The integration with AWS services like Glue, Iceberg, and Lake Formation enables bi-directional data flows and advanced use cases like running AI agents on both platforms.
• Customers are already seeing significant benefits in terms of improved productivity, personalized experiences, and AI-powered automation.