Has Salesforce Bought Its Missing Engagement Engine?

Constellation Research’s Liz Miller explains why Salesforce’s $5.66B Braze deal is about the execution layer behind data, AI, content, and customer engagement.  Salesforce has agreed to acquire Braze for $5.66B. The deal adds Braze’s real-time, cross-channel customer engagement and decisioning capabilities to Salesforce’s growing stack of CRM, data, AI, and content tools.  But, according to Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, this is about more than another acquisition.  Salesforce has spent years building out Customer 360, Data 360, Agentforce, and, more recently, Contentful. The missing piece was how brands actually execute engagement at scale: delivering a major product announcement to millions while also managing personalized, timely communication with individual customers.  In this CX Today interview, Miller discusses whether Braze gives Salesforce the engine it needed to turn customer data and AI into real-time customer engagement.  The conversation covers:  Why Salesforce’s Braze acquisition was not a surprise  The engagement execution gap in Salesforce’s wider strategy  Why data and AI are only useful when brands can act on them  The challenge of balancing mass brand communication with one-to-one engagement  What the acquisition could mean for Salesforce Marketing Cloud  Why Braze customers may be concerned about cost, simplicity, and innovation  Where Data 360, Contentful, Braze, and Agentforce could fit together  The integration risks that could define the deal’s success