Salesforce Connections 2026: The Enterprise Marketing Guide

Salesforce Connections is back in Chicago for 2026, and this year's event centers on a single question: what happens when AI stops assisting your marketing team and starts doing the work alongside them?

Connections is Salesforce's conference for marketing, commerce, and customer experience teams. It's smaller and more focused than Dreamforce, which means less noise and more direct access to the product roadmap, the engineers building it, and the marketing operations teams actually using it. If you run campaigns in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, this is the event where you'll see what's coming next and how to prepare for it.

Here's everything you need to know before you book your flight.

Everything you need to know about Connections 2026

Dates: June 3-4, 2026 (main event). Pre-event Trailblazer Bootcamp runs May 31-June 2.

Location: McCormick Place, Chicago, IL.

What you get: 280+ sessions, 50+ product demos, 20+ hands-on trainings, keynotes, an exclusive concert at Wintrust Arena, and lunch both days.

Who it's for: Marketing professionals, commerce teams, data and analytics practitioners, and marketing operations leaders. If your day involves Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, or Commerce Cloud, this is designed for you.

Day-by-day breakdown

What does it cost?

$699 registration is a fraction of what Adobe Summit or Dreamforce costs. For a two-day event with 280+ sessions and direct access to the Marketing Cloud product team, the value-per-session math works out to roughly $2.50 per session. Not that you'd attend all 280.

Session formats

The hands-on trainings are where you get the most practical value. If you're the person on your team who implements what the conference teaches, prioritize these.

The big theme: agentic marketing

Every Connections theme this year points in the same direction. Salesforce is positioning Agentforce as the next evolution of marketing automation, and the messaging is clear: AI agents don't just analyze your data or recommend next steps. They participate in the work.

Five pillars frame the event:

Two-way conversations. Orchestrate engagement across web, email, mobile, and in-person with shared context. The shift from broadcast to dialogue.

Real-time answers over reports. Ask your data questions while campaigns are in flight. Performance insights without waiting for the weekly dashboard pull.

Proactive over reactive campaigns. Anticipate what customers want next. Autonomous agents that optimize campaigns without waiting for a human to adjust.

Infinite personalization. AI-driven scale that moves from finite variants (A/B testing two subject lines) to infinite variants (personalized at the individual level). The promise is boost conversion without multiplying production effort.

Dynamic decisioning. Real-time audience and offer decisioning that adapts as signals change. Not set-it-and-forget-it automation but fluid, responsive campaign logic.

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the same trajectory the broader marketing AI conversation has been following: from AI as assistant to AI as active participant. The Connections-specific question is what this looks like inside the Salesforce ecosystem specifically, and what it means for teams that have built their operations on Marketing Cloud.

Sessions we're watching

The full catalog includes 280+ sessions. These are the ones that matter most for marketing operations and email teams.

Must-attend

From Drafts to Done: How Agentic AI Actually Ships Marketing. The most directly relevant session for email production teams. Agentic workflows that build campaigns from briefs, generate variants, orchestrate journeys, and optimize with performance signals. This is where you'll see what Agentforce looks like in practice for day-to-day marketing work, not just the keynote vision.

Why Last-Click Attribution Is Failing... and What Works Instead. Privacy changes, walled gardens, and AI discovery journeys have broken last-click. This session covers the shift to known audience and incrementality models. If your team is still reporting on last-click, this is the session that gives you the framework to propose something better.

How Developers Build Agentic Workflows for Modern Marketing. Technical session on building custom agents that connect data, logic, and actions. If you're the person who will actually implement Agentforce, this is your session. Patterns for secure, extensible marketing agents.

Worth your time

Marketing That Sparks a Conversation: Why Talk Is No Longer Cheap. The two-way engagement thesis applied to marketing. How AI and real-time data enable actual dialogue instead of one-way communication.

Adapting to the AI Shopping Era: How Brands Stay Discoverable. LLMs are changing how consumers shop. The session claims 10% of all retail consideration now occurs directly within LLM interfaces. If that number holds, the implications for SEO, SEM, and content strategy are significant.

Battle of the Builders: The Agentforce Hackathon. Hands-on competition where admins and builders design, configure, and deploy real-world Agentforce use cases. Less about watching, more about seeing what's actually possible when teams build with the tools.

Personalization with Purpose: Engaging HCPs and Patients Responsibly. Vertical-specific session for life sciences teams balancing personalization with compliance, consent, and role-based content. If you're in healthcare marketing, this is rare conference content that acknowledges your constraints.

What to look for in the full catalog

When the full session catalog drops, filter for these tracks:

• Marketing Cloud sessions — product roadmap, new features, migration updates
• Data Cloud sessions — real-time segmentation, audience building, CDP architecture
• Agentforce sessions — hands-on building, use case patterns, governance
• Commerce sessions — if your team touches both email and ecommerce

Pay attention to sessions that mention "Flow" — Salesforce is replacing Journey Builder with Flow-based orchestration. If you're running journeys in SFMC today, this transition is coming and Connections is where you'll learn the timeline.

What happened at Connections 2025

Last year's event was one of the most consequential in Marketing Cloud's history. Here's what was announced and why it still matters heading into 2026.

Marketing Cloud rebuilt natively on Salesforce's core platform. This was the headline. Marketing Cloud is no longer a bolted-on acquisition (ExactTarget, acquired 2013). It's being rebuilt on Salesforce's native architecture. For marketing ops teams, this means tighter CRM integration, unified data models, and less friction between sales and marketing systems. It also means change, and teams that haven't started preparing should use Connections 2026 to understand the migration path.

Agentforce for marketing launched. AI agents that participate in campaign creation and delivery. Not just analytics or recommendations, but agents that build email variants, optimize journeys, and adapt campaigns based on real-time performance signals.

Flow-based orchestration is replacing Journey Builder. This is the operational change that affects every SFMC team. Journey Builder has been the backbone of marketing automation in SFMC for over a decade. The shift to Flow-based orchestration changes how campaigns are built, tested, and managed. If you haven't explored this yet, Connections 2026 is the place to get hands-on.

Einstein AI enhancements for email. Predictive subject lines, send-time optimization, content recommendations, and dynamic personalization from CRM data. These capabilities are evolving rapidly, and the 2026 event will show what's shipped since and what's coming next.

Real-time segmentation via Data Cloud. Audience building that responds to behavior as it happens, not based on yesterday's batch export. Connected to Marketing Cloud's native rebuild.

Traveling to Chicago

Getting there

From O'Hare (ORD): The CTA Blue Line runs from O'Hare to downtown for $2.50 and takes about 45 minutes. From there, transfer to the Green Line southbound to the Cermak-McCormick Place station, or grab a rideshare for the last 15 minutes. Total door-to-door: roughly 75 minutes via CTA, 45-60 minutes by rideshare ($50-80, traffic dependent). Buy a Ventra card at the airport CTA station or use the Ventra app.

From Midway (MDW): Closer but fewer direct flights. The CTA Orange Line runs to downtown in 30 minutes ($2.50), then transfer to the Green Line. Total: about 55 minutes via CTA, 25-40 minutes by rideshare ($30-50).

Rideshare tip: Expect surge pricing during conference arrival and departure windows. I-90/94 traffic between O'Hare and downtown is unpredictable. The CTA is genuinely faster on bad traffic days, not just cheaper.

Where to stay

McCormick Place sits on Chicago's South Side, south of the Loop. Hotels in the area prioritize proximity over nightlife.

Book early. Conference rates go fast. The Hyatt Regency and Hampton Inn are both connected to McCormick Place and cover different budgets. The Marriott Marquis is the premium pick with the skybridge.

The Metra trick

Most first-timers don't know this: McCormick Place has a Metra Electric station inside the building, underneath the Grand Concourse in the South Building. It runs to Millennium Station in downtown Chicago in about 10 minutes. $3.75 one-way. This is the fastest way to get downtown for dinner, and it avoids the rideshare surge that hits every conference evening.

Where to eat

McCormick Place is not surrounded by restaurants. Lunch is provided at the conference, but for dinner, plan ahead.

Walking distance (South Loop). Pizano's Pizza (across the street, the obligatory Chicago pizza stop), Flo & Santos (Polish-Italian fusion, local favorite), Chicago Oyster House (higher-end seafood). The VU Rooftop Lounge at the Hilton has small plates and city views for evening drinks.

Chinatown (5 min rideshare). Some of the best food in the city, easy to reach. MingHin Cuisine for dim sum with large groups, Lao Sze Chuan for Szechuan (dry chili chicken is the signature), Xi'an Cuisine for hand-pulled noodles.

Motor Row District (short rideshare). Moody Tongue (brewery with actual dining, not just bar food), Manny's Cafeteria & Delicatessen (classic Chicago deli).

Downtown (10 min Metra). Where the full Chicago restaurant scene lives. Take the Metra from McCormick Place to Millennium Station and your options expand to Girl & The Goat, RPM Italian, and Frontera Grill.

Weather

Early June in Chicago: highs of 76-77°F (24-25°C), lows around 56-57°F (13-14°C). Comfortable outside, aggressively air-conditioned inside. McCormick Place sits on the lake, so expect a breeze. Pack layers — you'll want them for the conference hall and for evenings. Compact umbrella is worth throwing in the bag (30-40% rain chance on any given day).

Tips for first-timers

Download the Connections app early. Build your session schedule before you arrive. The popular hands-on trainings fill up, and with 280+ sessions across two days, you need a plan.

Prioritize hands-on over keynotes. Keynotes are recorded and available on-demand. Hands-on trainings are not. If you have to choose, choose the room where you're building something.

Bring business cards or have your LinkedIn ready. Connections is smaller than Dreamforce, which means you actually talk to people. The roundtable sessions are designed for this. Use them.

Plan your questions for Agentforce Consultations. One-on-one sessions with Salesforce product experts are available Day 1 and Day 2. These are worth their weight in gold if you come prepared with specific implementation questions rather than general "tell me about Agentforce" inquiries.

Stay for the Agentic Marketing Showdown. Day 1 evening features a live competition where builders compete to create the most effective marketing agent. It's the most entertaining way to see what Agentforce can actually do in practice.

Connect Connections to your stack. The sessions will cover what Salesforce is building. Your job is to figure out how it connects to what you already have. If you're running SFMC with a creation layer on top, the Agentforce announcements will tell you how AI fits into that architecture. If you're building emails directly in SFMC, the sessions on Flow-based orchestration and the enterprise marketing AI stack will help you see what's changing and what to build next.

What to take home

Connections is a two-day event. You won't attend everything. The practical goal is to leave with three things:

1. A clear picture of the Agentforce roadmap for marketing. What's shipping, when, and what your team needs to prepare for. This is the product intelligence that justifies the trip.
2. Hands-on experience with at least one new capability. Whether it's Flow-based orchestration, Data Cloud segmentation, or an Agentforce agent, actually building something in a training session produces more lasting knowledge than watching a keynote.
3. Two or three conversations with people solving the same problems you are. Roundtables and the smaller sessions create these. The Marriott Marquis lobby bar at 9pm creates these too. Connections is small enough that you'll run into the same people twice, which is where the real conversations happen.

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