Connections 2026: AI Stopped Being a Promise and Started Showing Up to Work

There's a version of every Salesforce conference that feels like a product catalogue in keynote form, with big themes, bigger promises, and a gap between the stage narrative and the actual code shipping. Connections 2026 in Chicago was not that event. For the first time, the AI story felt less like aspiration and had a whiff of execution to it. The question wasn't whether Salesforce was committed to the agentic future. The question was whether the audience had to energy to go back home and actually do something.

For those of us in commerce, the headline under the headline was this: Storefront Next went GA. And that matters more than most people outside the SFCC ecosystem will appreciate.

Storefront Next: The Foundation Underneath Everything

Salesforce had been telegraphing Storefront Next for months as a next-generation framework built on React Server Components, React Router 7, and TypeScript, with tighter Business Manager integration and managed hosting via MRT. It was always positioned as more than a PWA Kit replacement. It's a platform reset. And at Connections 2026, that reset became real.

Why does anyone need a platform reset right now? What Storefront Next actually represents is a codebase architecture that makes AI tooling work earlier in the project lifecycle. When Salesforce talks about AI-assisted development, they're not talking about a chatbot strapped to your IDE. They're talking about a framework that's tightly coupled enough, standards-based enough, that AI can understand, extend, and generate within it with genuine coherence. SFRA sites can be super fast. They can have CMS and Search plugged in to great effect. But they are not AI-friendly. Storefront Next is. That's not incidental. It's the point.

Our own team has been deep in this since last year: running a PoC, building out a starter, asking hard questions about how you extend cleanly without drifting from upstream. The early read is that the Commerce Apps extension model represents a genuine improvement in how integrations get built. The Page Designer investment, which Salesforce is clearly serious about, couples tightly here too, shifting how content experiences get delivered in ways we're still fully digesting.

At Connections, this was the foundation everything else was built on. The AI-assisted merchant workflows, the agentic campaign management, the Guided Shopping experiences, all of it flows more naturally through a storefront architecture that wasn't designed in 2015. Storefront Next is the plumbing, and the plumbing finally got replaced.

AI in Practice, Not Just in Pitch

What struck most observers at Connections 2026 was not the ambition (that's been consistent for two years), but the specificity. The sessions felt less like vision decks and more like implementation guides. One analyst noted that if Connections 2025 was about AI assistance, 2026 was about AI autonomy:Salesforce leaning hard into the Agentic Enterprise, where agents don't just generate content or summarize data, but take action across the marketing and commerce stack. Sure, I would have thought last year. This year they came with case studies. Maybe it’s trade show slop? But there was energy behind it.

I agree with that framing. Jon Reed at Diginomica covered the Generative Engine Optimization thread, which took up significant floor time, optimising content and products for AI discovery, showing up across the internet, not just brand-owned channels. It was a smart session and Reed covered it thoroughly. Though I'd gently push back on the implication that GEO should be the primary commerce headline of CNX 2026. For the platform builders in the room, the commerce infrastructure story (and specifically the Storefront Next-plus-Agentforce architecture) was the more lasting signal. GEO is a vital question to ask: how will people find us if Google aren’t sending them and they don’t actually need a website to buy stuff. But the agentic commerce platform is the foundational tool that allows a lot of those folks in Chicago to start answering that question. 

The Slack Moment

Let's talk about Slack, because the square footage alone told a story.

Salesforce gave Slack a keynote presence and show floor space at Connections 2026 that made one thing unmistakably clear: this is not a collaboration tool they acquired and manage at arm's length. Slack is being positioned, actively and visibly, as the agentic OS for the enterprise. Core Salesforce apps including Agentforce Sales, IT and HR Service, and Tableau Next now surface directly in Slack conversations. The vision is a single conversational workspace where humans and AI agents collaborate in the same interface, with CRM and all other data embedded and actionable in real time via 3p apps. I’m completely on board with this idea. Humans and Agents need to connect somewhere (for now!). The messaging platform is best place for it to happen. And Slack ought to win here. It helps too that even in Microsoft shops we work with the dev team uses Slack. So this may be a parallel sale to Teams rather than a replacement. The sale will be made in IT and with their endorsement to the rest of the business. Teams will just be the meetings part. 

If you've been watching Slack's positioning carefully, this isn't surprising. Salesforce has been calling it the "agentic enterprise operating system" for months. But there's a difference between a booth at Agentforce World Tour and a show floor centerpiece in Chicago. At Connections, it was at the middle of everything. For enterprise buyers evaluating whether Salesforce is serious about this architecture, that kind of investment in physical presence and keynote time is not accidental. It's a declaration.

For SFCC practitioners, the relevance is direct: the merchant workflow future that our 64labs product team have been sketching out (where an Easter campaign gets planned, built, measured, and adjusted across multiple teams without six FTEs and four weeks of elapsed time) lives in something like this. Slack is the winner.

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The Contentful Question: Wait, or Don't?

Then there's Contentful. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful on June 1, 2026. The analysis is largely positive: Contentful closes the CMS slot in Headless 360 that had previously been left open, and the integration story for Agentforce deployments becomes considerably cleaner when your content management layer is owned by the same platform.

It may be a bit of a nothing burger for Commerce Cloud. A kneejerk question for any commerce buyer evaluating a new SFCC build right now is: should I wait? If Contentful becomes native to the Salesforce platform, won't the integration be smoother in twelve months than today?

Maybe. But Commerce is not Salesforce’s priority. The deal won’t close until September. The integration into Agentforce beyond commerce will take priority. Contentful already works in Storefront Next if you need it to. The integration question used to be a stronger argument for hesitation than it is now. The development complexity calculus has shifted materially with Storefront Next. The extension model is cleaner. AI-assisted development with a standards-based codebase means implementation velocity is meaningfully faster than it was eighteen months ago. The carrying cost of waiting (in roadmap delay, in continued technical debt on SFRA, in missing the Agentforce capabilities that are already GA) is real.

So the answer isn't wait. The answer is to plan intelligently: choose Contentful if you love it for what it is. But don’t delay Storefront Next or imagine that there isn't still a good reason to pick Contentstack or Amplience or Builder et al. There are. So the best time to be implementing Contentful in SFCC is probably two years from now. I’m not sure the purchase changes much in ecommerce until 2028. 

The Through-Line

What Connections 2026 made clear is that Salesforce has arrived at the point they've been building toward for several years. The AI isn't decorative anymore though some presentations still very much need the disclaimer slide. Storefront Next provides the foundation for AI to actually function in commerce. Slack is the interface layer they're betting on at enterprise scale. And the Contentful acquisition, whatever its timeline, closes the last obvious gap in Salesforce’s “composable monolith” story.

The enthusiasm in Chicago wasn't the performative kind you sometimes sense at these events, the kind where everyone's excited because everyone else is excited. It was the quieter, more durable kind: practitioners who came in skeptical, left with viable case studies and a clearer sense of what the roadmap actually holds. That's the version of a Salesforce conference that goes beyond nabbing cuddly toys for your kids and actually having something to think about on the plane home.

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