Agentic Index
Hightouch vs Salesforce (2026)
Hightouch last verified ·Salesforce last verified
Hightouch and Salesforce both build customer profiles and run marketing agents on them, and they split on where the customer data lives. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Hightouch is a composable customer data platform on the customer's own warehouse. It reads Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery in place, resolves identities there, and syncs audiences to more than 300 destinations. Its AI Decisioning agents pick the message, channel and timing for each person within goals and guardrails a marketer sets, and measure themselves against a holdout. Salesforce's customer data platform is Data 360, formerly Data Cloud, which unifies sales, service, marketing and web data into one profile inside Salesforce, with Zero Copy reading from and sharing back to Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift and BigQuery. Agentforce agents act on that profile across sales, service and marketing, and Data 360's Agentic Memory keeps what they learn about each customer. Hightouch's agents can run on the customer's own Google Vertex, Snowflake Cortex or Databricks inference, and Agentforce administrators choose among OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Amazon models. Hightouch has a free plan with two active syncs and prices its paid plans through a demo. Data 360 Profiles start at $240 per 1,000 a year, and Agentforce Flex Credits are $500 per 100,000. Choose Hightouch to keep the warehouse as the source of truth. Choose Salesforce when Salesforce already holds the customer record and agents should work across the whole lifecycle.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Hightouch and Salesforce are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 1,084 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
This comparison, as a video
Hightouch vs Salesforce in 8 minutes
A short walkthrough of what each product does, how they are priced, where they overlap and when to choose each.
Choose Hightouch if
- Customer data already lives in Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery, and profiles and identity resolution should stay there.
- Each customer should get the message, channel and timing an AI Decisioning agent picks, measured against a holdout.
- Agents should save nothing until a person approves it, and generated creative should pass named reviewers first.
- Audiences should reach more than 300 destinations, including Braze, Iterable and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
- You want to start free with two active syncs, or buy AI Decisioning without the CDP.
Choose Salesforce if
- Salesforce is already your system of record, and profiles should unify sales, service, marketing and web data inside it.
- Agents should work the whole lifecycle, resolving service cases and working sales records as well as marketing.
- Warehouse data should join through Zero Copy, read in place and shared back to Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift or BigQuery.
- Agents should remember session summaries, profile facts and preferences for each customer through Agentic Memory.
- You want published rates, and your Enterprise Edition org already includes 200,000 Flex Credits through Salesforce Foundations.
| Feature | H Hightouch |
S Salesforce |
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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HightouchIntegrations & Tool Calling Agents act in systems Hightouch does not own. Syncs write audiences into destinations across advertising, email, SMS, push and web, AI Decisioning sends its messages through Braze, Iterable or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Lifecycle Studio exports approved messages to the connected ESP. Sources include Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery, with Amazon SQS and Kinesis event sources added in October 2026. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/ai-decisioning/overview, docs/lifecycle-studio/overview and docs/changelogread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceIntegrations & Tool Calling Agents act on the customer's systems through actions. Agentforce Builder connects agents to data, channels and existing Salesforce assets including Flows, Apex, MuleSoft APIs and prompt templates, and out of the box actions cover common jobs such as order and reservation management. Sourcesalesforce.com/agentforce/agent-builderread 2026-09-18 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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HightouchWorkflow Orchestration Agents handle the full loop of audience building, journey orchestration, cross channel launch, measurement and feeding learnings back into the next decision, across advertising, email, SMS and web. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/ai-decisioning/overviewread 2026-10-01 |
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SalesforceWorkflow Orchestration Agent Script defines how work moves through an agent. Every request begins at an agent router that sets initial variables and classifies the request, then the agent processes a subagent and transitions between subagents along paths the script defines. Across agents, an orchestrator agent can invoke specialized agents in other Salesforce orgs and outside Salesforce through the Agent API, and a flow action can invoke an agent as one step of a longer automation. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/docs/ai/agentforce/guide/ascript-flow.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
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HightouchTriggers & Channel Coverage AI Decisioning agents operate continuously, choosing the message, channel and timing for each user without a person starting each run, and saved agent reports run on a schedule and deliver to email or Slack. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/ai-decisioning/agents and docs/agents/overviewread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceTriggers & Channel Coverage Headless agents are called without a human trigger from a user interface. An Apex trigger or a scheduled job calls the agent as part of a background process, and a standard AI Agent action lets any flow, including one started by a record change, invoke an active agent with a prompt. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/blogs/2025/04/build-headless-agents-with-the-agent-api.htmlread 2026-09-18 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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HightouchKnowledge Grounding & RAG Agents query the customer's own warehouse and connected channels such as Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Braze and Iterable, and Context Hub manages the knowledge they draw on, files, definitions, brand profiles, guardrails and channel connections, with Snowflake semantic views, Databricks Unity Catalog metric views and Google Drive as governed sources. Lifecycle Studio reads templates, imported images, Customer Studio audiences and campaign history from a connected ESP. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/agents/overview, docs/lifecycle-studio/overview and docs/changelogread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceKnowledge Grounding & RAG Agents are grounded in the customer's own material. An Agentforce Data Library connects an agent to trusted unstructured or semi structured sources, such as files or a knowledge base, which the customer adds to the library and the agent retrieves from when it answers, and new material is added to the library with no retraining. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/docs/ai/agentforce/guide/headless-examples-agent-adl.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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HightouchMemory & State Persistence Agent chats persist for follow up questions, AI Decisioning agents keep learning from real outcomes such as clicks and purchases from one run to the next, and Context Hub holds the files, definitions, brand profiles and guardrails agents use. No memory the agent writes for itself, with a stated scope and lifetime, is described. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/agents/overview and docs/ai-decisioning/agents; hightouch.com/docs/ai-decisioning/agentsread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceMemory & State Persistence Agent Script variables carry context through a session, shared by every subagent, and a session ID carries it across invocations. Beyond the session, Data 360's Agentic Memory extracts a summary of each conversation, profile facts and preferences from a registered agent's conversations. Memory is scoped to a data space and a unified individual, and agent level access control decides which agents read which memories. Conversation summaries and profile facts persist until deleted, while preferences fade unless they are reinforced, and an expired entry can be recovered by updating its validTo field. Memory Management APIs create, retrieve, update and delete memory entries, which is how a product lets people view, edit and delete their own facts and preferences. Deletion is permanent. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/docs/data/agentic-memory-context memory overview and memory managementread 2026-10-25 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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HightouchHuman Oversight & Guardrails Agents never create or change anything without approval, and drafts made in chat, such as audiences or reports, are saved only when a user reviews them. Workspaces assign user and agent reviewers to check generated creative before it is published, Lifecycle Studio never sends a message without approval, and AI Decisioning works only within the audience, goals, approved messages and guardrails the marketer sets, without changing the base content. Every agent query is scoped to the data the current user may see. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/agents/overview, docs/agents/settings, docs/lifecycle-studio/overview and docs/ai-decisioning/overviewread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceHuman Oversight & Guardrails Escalation to a person is a built in agent utility. The utils.escalate call hands the conversation to a human service rep through an Omni-Channel routing connection the customer defines, and instructions tell the agent when to call it. Agent Script structures what the agent may do, with every request passing an agent router that classifies it before any subagent runs and explicit transitions between subagents, and Salesforce's own guidance recommends a person check model responses before they are shared in most use cases. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/docs/ai/agentforce/guide/ascript-ref-utils.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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HightouchSecurity, Identity & Governance Hightouch holds SOC 2 Type 2 and an ISO 27001 certificate from Schellman, supports customer HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA compliance, and runs regular third party penetration tests. Workspace governance covers SSO and SCIM, role based access with custom roles, label based controls, approval workflows and audit logs, with TLS 1.2 or higher in transit, and cached AI artifacts are single tenant and never used to train shared or third party models. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/security/overviewread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceSecurity, Identity & Governance Salesforce holds attestations scoped to the agent layer itself, including a SOC 2 report and a SOC 3 report for the Einstein Platform and Agentforce on Hyperforce, an ISO 42001 certificate covering the Salesforce AI Platform and Agentforce, a PCI attestation of compliance for Data Cloud, the Einstein Platform and Agentforce, a C5 report, an IRAP assessment and Spain ENS High for the Einstein Platform and Agentforce, alongside FedRAMP High and Moderate and ISO 27001 categories. Sourcecompliance.salesforce.com/enread 2026-09-18 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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HightouchObservability & Auditability Every agent has a default run failure monitor, with Slack, email, PagerDuty, SMS or webhook alerts for failures, stalled runs and drops in recommendation volume, and a Health tab shows pipeline runs, channel delivery rates and outcome data freshness. The Overview tab shows eligible users, performance per goal against the holdout with confidence intervals and sends by message, and the workspace keeps audit logs. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/ai-decisioning/agents and docs/security/overviewread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceObservability & Auditability Every step of an agent interaction is recorded. The Agentforce Session Tracing data model and the Generative AI Audit and Feedback data model capture turns, messages, LLM calls, actions, metric scores and feedback, and the Session Trace OTel API exports a full session as OpenTelemetry JSON for any observability tool or OTLP collector. Trace files can also be managed from the command line during development, and the Einstein Trust Layer keeps an audit trail of generations. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/docs/ai/agentforce/guide/otel-api.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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HightouchDeployment & Data Residency Workspaces deploy in a supported region on AWS, GCP or Azure, and the platform is warehouse native. Hightouch keeps no long lived copy of primary customer tables, storing logs, change data capture state and row level status in a cloud bucket, Hightouch managed on self service plans with about 30 days of retention and the customer's own bucket on business and enterprise plans. The deterministic identity graph runs inside the customer's warehouse. The control plane is cloud SaaS, with no self hosted option. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/security/overview and docs/identity-resolution/overviewread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceDeployment & Data Residency Salesforce runs on Hyperforce, its public cloud infrastructure, where customer data is generally stored in the country where the customer's org is located, provided the services in use are available in that Hyperforce country, and a secure backup of an org can be held in a secondary Hyperforce region. Sourcesalesforce.com/platform/public-cloud-infrastructureread 2026-09-18 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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HightouchPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Customer Studio has three template types, audience, sync and journey, each with its own browsable list in the product. Templates can be previewed with size calculation and destination preview, then applied to create a new object from a configured starting point, syncs stay linked to their template so locked-field changes carry through, and a workspace setting can require sync templates for every audience activation. Customers stock the library themselves, with platform admins typically creating and governing templates and marketers applying them. The named examples, a churn-risk audience, a standard Braze sync, a new-customer welcome series, and cart abandonment and welcome series journeys, are things a customer would build. Suggested reports are generated output, and the email-component and image libraries hold the customer's imported material. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/customer-studio/templates and hightouch.com/docs/customer-studio/journeysread 2026-09-02 |
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SalesforcePrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Agentforce Builder starts agents from out of the box subagents, actions and templates that cover common jobs such as order management, reservation management and general FAQs, which the customer then extends and refines with natural language instructions. Sourcesalesforce.com/agentforce/agent-builderread 2026-09-18 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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HightouchModel Flexibility & Routing Hightouch Agents run on a Hightouch managed inference provider by default, and a customer can connect its own provider instead, Google Vertex, Snowflake Cortex or Databricks, so data stays within its own infrastructure, which puts third party models the customer selects behind the agents. No choice of model by maker is described beyond that provider, and AI Decisioning runs on Hightouch's own reinforcement learning system, which counts for nothing here. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/agents/settings and docs/ai-decisioning/overviewread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceModel Flexibility & Routing An administrator sets the org level model for Agentforce on the Agentforce Agents page in Setup, and Agent Script overrides it for a specific agent or subagent with a model configuration naming any supported model. The supported list spans Salesforce managed models from OpenAI, Anthropic on Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini on Vertex AI and Amazon Nova, most running inside the Salesforce trust boundary, and customers can also bring their own model. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/docs/ai/agentforce/guide/ascript-model.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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HightouchAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility A hosted MCP server, enabled by Hightouch at no additional cost, lets any MCP client, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini Enterprise or Microsoft Copilot, read the schema, build and save audiences, create and analyze journeys, manage syncs and create them from templates, with email and SMS content for Lifecycle Studio customers and ad creative for Ad Studio customers, all within the workspace's role based access. A Personalization API, Hightouch Events and a Resource API on the enterprise tier sit alongside it. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/ai-integrations/mcpread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility The Agent API opens a conversation with an agent, sends prompts synchronously or as a stream of server sent events marking progress, text chunks and the end of each turn, and closes the session, authenticated through a connected app with OAuth scopes, with a public Postman collection and Node.js client. Inside the platform, an invocable action runs any active agent from Apex or Flow, and Salesforce Hosted MCP Servers expose Salesforce data and automation to external AI agents and LLM applications over MCP. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/blogs/2025/04/build-headless-agents-with-the-agent-api.htmlread 2026-09-18 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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HightouchTesting, Debugging & Optimization An agent can carry a holdout set at creation, and users in it receive no messages, so lift is measured against what would have happened anyway, with confidence intervals once enough event data is collected. Goals are weighted from best to worst outcomes and can count toward decisions or be tracked only, and the Insights page breaks results down by message, goal impact and timing. The holdout withholds the agent's own treatment, so it measures the agent itself. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/ai-decisioning/agentsread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceTesting, Debugging & Optimization Agents are tested before release with scored test cases. A test spec sets out test cases as utterances with the expected agent behavior, can set context variables and include ready made metrics in the output, and is created and run in a development org from the command line or the Agentforce Testing Center, with pass and fail results. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/docs/ai/agentforce/guide/agent-dx-test.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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HightouchBrowser & Computer Use Hightouch works through warehouse queries and destination integrations and does not drive a browser or operate a computer interface. Sourcehightouch.com/docs/ai-decisioning/overviewread 2026-10-24 |
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SalesforceBrowser & Computer Use Operating a browser or desktop interface is not part of Agentforce. Agents act through actions, flows, Apex, APIs, prompt templates and MCP tools, reached through the agent router and subagents in Agent Script. Sourcedeveloper.salesforce.com/docs/llms-genai.txtread 2026-09-18 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing |  Hightouch |
 Salesforce |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Free Basic Reverse ETL plan with up to two active syncs. The Agentic Marketing Platform and the Composable CDP are usage based and priced through a demo, with no dollar price published. | $500 per 100,000 Flex Credits, with a standard action consuming 20 credits ($0.10), or $2 per conversation. Per user licenses start at $5 per user a month, and the Agentforce Coworker User License is $50. |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, partial | Public, partial |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Usage based, with no limit on monthly tracked users and no caps on sources, destinations or seats. | Flex Credits drawn down per agent action, a per conversation rate or per user licensing, all on top of Salesforce edition subscriptions. |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | High variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tierTrial
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No free tierTrial
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Sales call | Sales call |
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Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked |
Product updates
Newest first, each linked to its source.
Hightouch
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· Agent capability
Hightouch's agentic marketing platform now sends lifecycle messages itself, so campaigns its agents build can run end to end without a separate engagement platform.
Source -
· Observability / auditability
Agent responses in Hightouch now cite the definitions and assumptions behind each part of an answer.
Source
Salesforce
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· Human approval / guardrails
Agent Kill Switch is now generally available in Agent Fabric, the Salesforce control plane for governing agents across platforms, so a team can pull an agent offline from one place.
Source -
· MCP / tool calling / API
Agentforce agents can now authenticate to external MCP servers with per user credentials, listed under Agentforce Interoperability in the Winter '27 release notes and rolling out to upgraded orgs from the week of October 5.
Source -
· Agent capability
Salesforce announced beta availability of Agent Optimizer, which connects agent configuration, conversational testing, and production session analysis.
Source
Hightouch and Salesforce are separate companies. Hightouch syncs audiences into Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and AI Decisioning can send its messages through Marketing Cloud, so a buyer can run the two together.
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